Despite how unrelated writing and lifting may seem on the surface, the two have long felt to me like alternate ways of performing the same exercise, making something out of nothing. The things that draw me to the gym each morning are, in large part, the same things that bring me to my desk to write each afternoon. I write and lift in equal measure each day precisely because of how complimentary they feel, as though each endeavor contained a little of the other.
On the obvious side, both writing and lifting require discipline and dedication for any perceivable progress to be made. They demand the do-er show up and do. Weak spots left untrained will inevitably reveal themselves over time, and will do so all the more distinctly as the areas of greater focus tighten up. Both writing and lifting demand you see through the surface of the mirror or the blank page, forcing you to project your vision forward in time, to believe fully in things that don't yet exist. And yet, each also demands you engage directly with an unbudgeable present. Whether lifting or writing, I show up whether I want to or not. I make their respective practices as nonnegotiable as the sun's entrance and exit.
Writing and lifting also necessitate a measure of solitude. Of course, most writers have a confidant or two with whom they share drafts and pending disasters without fear of humiliation. An obvious meathead analogue exists in the "gym buddy," a contemporary form of bromance predicated on long-term commitment, mutual improvement, and the glory of shared "gains."
But for the most part, lifting and the long physical and psychological road of consciously building one's body is, by default, a solo mission. It's ultimately you against the pull of the earth as channeled through a bar, a rope, a pulley. Pick things up and put them down enough, and you start to develop a more acutely felt relationship to your motor system, a one-to-one connection between your body and, well, everything.
Most writers will confess that the process of writing -- reduced by many into a purely mental exercise -- is in actuality a gruelingly physical trial. The process of moving one's thoughts through the body, down the arms and out through the fingertips, the act of sustaining these bursts of tension and release for hours on end, the labors of creation and output can feel, themselves, like acts of resistance training. (And that's assuming you can drag your body weight to the desk in the first place.)
Similarly, many lifters will attest to the extreme mental demands of lifting weights, which often rival the physical difficulties. Lifting weights -- especially ones that are heavier than you -- requires the recruitment of intense concentration, clarity, and connection. In personal-trainer lingo, this cultivated rapport between one's mind and one's musculature is known as proprioception: an awareness of one's body, of its motion through and occupation of space. Longtime lifters develop a downright dancerly control over the minute mechanics of their bodies, and yet each rep originates as pure abstraction, mere intention, volition transposed into action. If lifting is mindless, it is mindfully so.
Both writing and lifting require reporting to a specific mental and sometimes physical place. Both involve a close courtship with failure. Words, like weights, are just dumb representations -- one of gravity, the other of meaning -- awaiting activation, realization, elevation.
But in my thinking, one thing aligns writing and lifting more closely than anything else.
Both are formal concerns . . .
In lifting, as in art, form is everything.
Most form boils down to eliminating the separation between your body and the bar, connecting with the floor through your feet, embracing the weight, distributing it through the architecture of your body, holding gravity in your arms. You become momentarily more.
When I lie on the bench and pinch an imaginary pencil between my shoulder blades as instructed by the coach who dismantled my bad form and rebuilt it in his own image ten years ago; when I construct a little suspension bridge from the arch in my back, ensuring that my butt ever so gingerly grazes the bench (as is compulsory in competition); when I plant my heels and grip the bar hard enough so that the hatch lines of its knurling stamp my palms; when I take a big breath of air, store it in my belly, and dislodge the bar from the rack; when I draw the bar down to my chest as though I were pulling open the drawer of a flat file; when I store that tension in my lats as though I were drawing a bow threaded through my back; when I fire each muscle and launch the bar back up toward the fluorescents and lock my arms; when I do it again and again executing each repetition precisely like this, just as I was shown and told until I could show and tell you; and when I do reps until I can no longer do them in precisely this way, I am not only following good form, I am carrying forth an inheritance, I am bearing a tradition, I am embodying an ideal, an attempt at perfection, an expression of desire.
Enjoy Your Lifting!
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