Exercise more. Your writing will only suffer from a lack of routine and exercise. It’s one thing to hear it from fellow meatheads or the stereotypical athlete or the freaks gifted with genes, but when you hear it from even the people with the white-collar computer desk chairs, you know it’s important to stay healthy, stay motivated, and take care of yourself.

Investing in your body is the same as investing in your career. Don’t matter what strides you make in the business world or how far your resume has gone if your body doesn’t hold up til 50. Ask Poe. Ask Hemingway.

Listen, I’m not asking you to pull a Juancho Hernangomez in Hustle (2022) getting coached by Adam Sandler at 3:30am getting ready for the NBA combine jogging up hills Rocky/Million Dollar Baby-style with the athleticism of if Scottie Pippen and a wolf had a baby that was babysat by Allen Iverson (real quote from the film, by the way).

Not asking you to do any of that, however, taking care of our bodies through exercise is nine times out of ten the most rewarding forms of self-care. You can ignore this blog if you’re someone with physical disabilities preventing you from certain exercise, but otherwise…

Take it from me, the guy without a gym membership who resorts to push-ups and curls on his bedroom mat and a jog outside the hill I live on. I go for walks for about 2 hours a day and I stretch (occasionally).

One thing I’ve learned is that routine is important. I used to play collegiate ultimate frisbee and that would take care of the exercise for me, but obviously since graduation, my only source of exercise is, well, whenever I feel like it. And no one ever feels like exercising. Yet my job working remotely as a literary agent and a video editor has me chronically online, in front of my computer for a nauseating amount of time, and it’s unhealthy for both my mind and my back.

Scientifically speaking, you’re more likely to come up with creative ideas following exercise. It’s as if your mind is having a cathartic release, the neurons traveling through the axon terminals of your brain are unblocked, and there’s a new rush of ideas. I’ve found the longer you stay stagnant, the harder it is to write. This may be obvious, and I myself wasn’t always a sedentary person, but lately I’ve found myself bating into that trap and not taking the time to really practice self-care. It has to be daily, not just in short spurts here and there every month. 

That isn’t to say you need rigorous training with weighted training gear and a gym partner and full-time yoga instructor, in fact I’ve found any sort of rigid system is equally as damaging to the writing process, overloading your brain until it’s full-blown procrastination crisis and block. 

The answer is somewhere in the middle, as most things in life often are.

Sets of push-ups and sit-ups, stretches that untense your leg and arm and especially hand muscles are ideal. Walks and runs are the best possible exercise for writers, especially with a well-crafted music playlist to boot (this deserves its own blog post). 

A majority of my story ideas have come from walks and daily interactions away from my notepad and away from my computer and away from home, and that’s how it’s supposed to be, but sometimes we forget when caught in the Wednesday hump and in crunch of deadlines.

So, if you ever find yourself slouching too much or cramping uncomfortably from chronic writing, editing, and reading, let this be your call to practice self-care today and get some exercise and drink water. I needed the reminder today, and the shock of that made me need to remind you all today too.