Basic fitness for writers

No, seriously!

Listen, I promise this is about fitness, but I have to tell you a sad story first. Consider it context or whatever. My reason for writing this thing. Back in November of 2021, my good friend Petra Mayer passed away from a pulmonary embolism. Petra was my editor at NPR. She was the first editor to take a pitch from me there. She showed me how to really use the em dash. She asked for more of my voice. She was instrumental in my reviewing career. When I landed the New York Times gig, I wrote her an email and saved it. Her ghost has access to my inbox. In any case, fuck pulmonary embolisms, right? Fuck all embolisms and fuck cancer while we’re at it. But here’s the thing, I’m a certified personal trained and know that while the blood clots that cause pulmonary embolisms can form for a variety of reasons, one of the most common things done as preventative care is exercise.

Now, I’m and writer and educator and many of my friends are writers and educators. Some of my friends work in offices. A bunch work from home. Most of them work sitting down. If you’re reading this, you probably work sitting down. I constantly feel the urge to post on social media and text my friends and yell about standing up and moving around and stretching and taking care of your body and your mental health because those two things are IMPORTANT AS FUCK. But I don’t. That would be annoying and people would quickly tune me out because we all stop listening to stuff we hear all the time. It becomes background noise. I get it. But the urge is still there, so this is me, screaming about this once and hopefully not being too annoying about.

Let’s just get to it. Here are your fitness tips, writers!

• If you’re not dealing with mobility issues that keep you from doing so–and if you are, I see you! Good luck and sending love–get the fuck up. Seriously. Up and walking. Around the room a few times. Around the house. Around the block. Jog two miles. Start training for a marathon. No, seriously, whatever you can do to start is enough. “You need to walk 10k steps for blah blah blah!” Yeah, sure, but 3000 or 6000 steps per day when the previous average was 1000 is a big win. The formula is simple: moving is good for your health. Walk. Dance. Swim. Box. Play catch with your kid or partner or that creepy kid with black eyes that hangs down by the big tree at the end of the block.

• Take care of your back. Take care of your shoulders. Take care of your wrists. You can’t sit there looking like a fucking shrimp in a hoodie for nine hours straight and then jump off the sofa and want to feel like life’s worth living and you’re a muscular panther making its way to the fridge. Think of stress and anxiety as big dudes with bats. While you’re busy trying to survive all the shit going on inside you, the two dudes are also out there, beating your neck, shoulders, traps, lower back, and hamstrings into a pulp. If you bend your legs underneath you while you write or use the computer at work (yeah, I’ve seen a bunch of you), you can add your knees and ankles to that list. Listen, short of rearranging your life and buying one of those standup desks, there’s no way around the sitting. So sit. Sit and work. Create. Kick ass. You got this. But stretch. Be honest with yourself and look for stretches that focus on the areas that bother you the most. Learn basic, no-impact stretches for your shoulders, neck, lower, middle, and upper back, quads, hips, and calves. Relax your grip once in a while. Take as many breaks as you can. Stretch that fucking wrist!

• Wanna lose weight? Don’t believe anything you read online until you’ve spoken to someone you trust. Oh, the level of bullshit I see out there! Makes wanna stab someone. Soup diets. Cabbage diets. Potato diets. Watermelon diets. Fast for 30 days diets. Drink a tablespoon of soy sauce on an empty stomach first thing in the morning diets. Raw bull testicle diets. Mediterranean diets. Drink olive oil diets. Only eat sushirritos in LA diets. Spend all your money on placenta pills diets. Nothing but bacon and sticks of butter diets. No. Stop. You’re smart and you probably have a smart phone or a computer. Keep track of what you eat for a week or so. Like, what you honestly eat, you know? I also buy an occasional three donuts as I’m leaving the grocery store because that shit is better than murder or heroin or setting places on fire. Know how much you eat and roughly what your caloric intake is like? Cool, now get a free pedometer or use the one on your phone or do whatever you want and figure out roughly how many calories you burn on a regular day. Now listen, these numbers can be a nice surprise because you watch what you eat and don’t take whole months or years off and listen to your doctor or they can be an ugly surprise because who the fuck has health insurance these days and you eat what you can when you can or grab something from a drive-thru because you have to drive the kids to six different places. Point is, you have your numbers. Now, if the intake is much larger than the expenditure, what happens, boys and girls and nonbinary folks?! That’s right! So yeah, start with buying two donuts instead on three. Then buy one. Then skip the donut. Call someone a motherfucker as you drive. Buy a punching bag. There are plenty of things cooler, cheaper, and healthier than stress/anxiety/I live in a tire fire eating. Find the ones you love and do more of those. Now skip the soda. It’s bad for your teeth anyway. Oh, what’s that? You feel better? Fuck the scale. You feel better, things are better. Keep making those little changes–hey, edibles are better than beer!–and soon you’ll feel your clothes start to fit different. Now keep going. You got this.

Yeah, sorry that’s so long. I have more to say, but I’ve yelled enough. Just take care of yourselves, okay? If you have questions, reach out. Stay cool.