Fitness for Artists
Fitness journeys are annoying. Here's mine anyway.
I recently asked my Instagram audience of art students, artists, and fans of my aging rock band whether or not they wanted to hear about my “fitness journey”. I received mostly non-responses, some supportive responses and one confident no—in the form of a barf emoji.
Tales of fitness journeys among visual artists are relatively rare. I understand why these kinds of stories provoke a barf-like response among creative people. There’s associations with body shaming. Weird capitalist incentives. Toxic bro culture. And who gets to have a fitness journey anyway? Often it’s people like me with a little bit of time and money to spare which is rarely the case for artists. And finally and perhaps more importantly, for a long time the idea of fitness seemed completely at odds with the stereotype that I happen to fit: the skinny black-clad artist. But now here I am. Here you are! I’m still thin but I’ve been to the gym pretty consistently for a few years, worked with a trainer for the last year, and now I’m going to tell you all about it. Whether you barf or not is your business and yours alone.
My journey — actually let’s call it a fitness odyssey it just sounds cooler — did not start when I hired a personal trainer almost exactly one year ago. Or in my twenties while I was living in a half-abandoned warehouse and too poor to eat healthy. It started when I was a teenager. Cue the 90’s music!
Breaks & Brakes
During a cul-de-sac roller-hockey game my friend Sam had checked me hard enough to knock me over. When I put my hand out to catch myself and hit the pavement that’s when it happened, my wrist cracked. Turns out this is a pretty common injury for skaters of all stripes. For me at 6’4” the addition of a few extra inches that Rollerblade wheels provided — and the force added by my friend Sam — was enough to make the fall pretty hard. In the 90’s nobody wore helmets or wrist guards or anything else. We just zoomed around at dangerously high speeds on different kinds of wheels smashing into each other and objects with no parental supervision hoping for the best. Honestly, it is a miracle that anyone from the 80’s or 90’s is still alive.
I was average in athleticism for an American kid from a middle-class family in a rural area. That is, I spent summers first playing tee-ball and running around outside, then basketball. There weren’t experienced coaches or resources or trainers around but we had fun. Basketball was a big part of my life for a while because I was tall and people would always ask if I played basketball and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Or my father. That all started to change after my dad died and then changed again after I broke my wrist.
I decided to go to varsity basketball tryouts as a sophomore for the last time. I did not make the team the previous year, and my newly widowed mom suspected it was because she couldn’t afford to give enough money to the Catholic high school I attended (some of the kids on the team were not great players but had wealthy parent-donors). I liked that my mom stuck up for me but I suspected that the real reason I didn’t make the basketball team the previous year was that I wasn’t good at basketball (“not aggressive enough” is how my dad liked to put it). Regardless, I decided to give it one more shot.
During the summer months before varsity tryouts I woke up and ran with the team for conditioning. Even then I knew something was a little off. For starters I was the only one at conditioning wearing oversized black tee-shirts emblazoned with macabre art and album covers of alternative rock bands. I didn’t have a friend on the team. I had started smoking cigarettes on weekends. Still, I kept up with everyone as we ran around and around the school. But unfortunately, basketball tryouts happened to be just a few days after I broke my wrist. The coaches took one look at me in the bulky black cast and sent me home. “He’ll hurt somebody with that,” they told my Mom and that was the end. When my cast finally came off a few weeks after tryouts I decided to learn guitar and focus on drawing and never looked back. It is safe to say I fully abandoned athletics and fitness in favor of pursuing a creative life (okay it’s probably the case that even if I had played basketball in High School it wouldn’t have made much difference to the rest of my life. But let’s just pretend, because it raises the narrative stakes).
Then as now choosing to be an artist was not associated with good health. I was no exception. In my twenties the idea of fitness was laughable. I could barely afford to eat enough to keep myself healthy, let alone put on muscle or burn a bunch of extra calories on an elliptical machine just for fun. I almost died before an emergency surgery on my intestines. I smoked heavily for about a decade while playing a lot of rock shows with my band. I consistently went to sleep at 4am. I discovered that I had a heart condition Mitral Vale Prolapse after an anxious trip to the E.R. But all of this I reasoned was just part of being me. Fortunately, popular notions of both who should exercise and how they should do it are expanding.
Although it’s still difficult to spot painters and sculptors at the gym, fitness today is a giant industry with a dizzying number of niches for any kind of people looking to do any kind of exercise. These groups range from gentle yoga classes for pregnant women to The Swoletariat, an online community for Marxist body-builders. And believe it or not, inline-skating is cool again! Truthfully, I still feel a bit out of sorts in fitness-focused spaces but I am making an effort to be more comfortable. And honestly it’s not just about me anymore anyway, it’s about my son Linus.
Losing a parent is one of the most brutal experiences a person can have. That it happens to nearly everyone at some point is just a sad fact of the human experience. For young people it can be especially harrowing as I can attest. I was thirteen when I lost my dad to sporadic cancer. So now, one of my main priorities as a father is quite simple: stay alive.
Weird Pronouncements
On around my fortieth birthday I was walking down a flight of stairs while playing on my phone. I missed a step and sprained my ankle. This was the first of several injuries that in my youth probably would have been trivial. I rolled my ankle all the time playing basketball as a kid. Yet as a man in my early forties the sprain required physical therapy. Although I had been riding an exercise bike and doing some ill-advised experiments with at-home strength-training, it seemed that the harder I worked to get stronger, the weaker I became. So, I did something a younger version of me would never have imagined: I hired a personal trainer.
Honestly, it’s nice just to do something different. It has been a while since I took up a brand new skill or hobby and strength-training has surprisingly scratched that itch. And as it turns out fitness can serve as a surprising compliment to other aspects of living a creative life. Over the course of hitting the gym pretty regularly for the last year or so I have had many revelations about the connections between exercise and painting. You read that right. Like a weirdo I sometimes make these pronouncements out loud to my personal trainer while exerting myself. It is true: exercise is like art-making, perhaps more than a lot of artists would like to admit. Let us count the ways:
the hardest thing can just be showing up consistently.
you should establish good habits and technique in the beginning so you don’t have to spend a lot more time correcting them later on
success comes primarily from hard-work rather than talent or any inherent ability
there will be valleys. the middle part is the hardest.
there’s often (but not always) a strong interest in aesthetics
everybody’s definition of success is going to be different and that’s okay!
Units of Measurement
The gym is weird, it’s true. There’s people just standing around flexing, sweating, grunting, wearing flashy clothes, saying weird things, trying not to look at each other and doing all this while they look perfectly buff or beautiful (at least at the gym in my college town which is populated in part by young athletes).
A lot has been written about beauty standards in relation to the arts and especially photography. Maybe this started with Botticelli, Michelangelo and others. Today it’s about Instagram. But this conversation about art as a reflection of cultural beauty ideals is beyond the scope of this writing. Let me just say that looking better can make people feel better, and that feeling good is in itself a worthy goal. Here’s a bit from a short and sweet Artsy article on artists and exercise:
Feeling good is not trivial. By necessity, studies hew to the quantifiable aspects of the relationship between exercise and creativity, namely defined types of cognition. But creativity, itself a fuzzy term, flourishes in ways that go well beyond divergent or convergent thinking. Certain emotional states, such as feeling good—and thus having low anxiety and fear—helps induce the flow states that are foundational to creative work.
That’s all good. Not only have I felt better since exercising consistently but I haven’t been back to physical therapy, my heart doesn’t bother me, and my stretchy joints don’t hurt.
As my four-year-old son Linus grows and becomes heavier I have become slightly stronger too. My slowly progressing strength has tracked almost exactly with his growth, to the extent that I mostly measure things at the gym in terms of Linuses. Although I do not expect to ever be able to lift more than two or three small Linuses, I am hopeful to be able to keep up with him for a while and to continue running and playing with him long into his teenage years. This is a thought that brings me immense joy, particularly since I did not get to experience that with my own father.
Although I’ve put on ten or fifteen pounds of muscle (which is barely noticeable on my tall frame) the objective “gains” are slow. Exercise is just as much about maintenance, particularly as the aging process has become more real in my forties. Before, I always kind of thought I was broken in some way. Now, I have found that with the right knowledge and resources I can just address pains and discomfort at the gym as they come up. I can maintain.
Excuses are fine
Here’s the thing about teaching and training and life: adversity not only makes people stronger it makes them more compassionate. My trainer and friend Clay Baxter has for years struggled with Lyme disease and persistent headaches from a head injury. Like I did, he started college a little bit later due to taking some life detours. All this has made him highly sensitive to the needs of different kinds of people. A lot of the profiles of personal trainers that I had read and promptly dismissed were essentially (in a Pro wrestler voice) NO EXCUSES. GET MOVING! NO PAIN NO GAIN! When I read Clay’s thoughtful writing I finally took the leap. It is safe to say that everything I know about fitness and exercise and strength-training comes from one dude: an enormously buff, intelligent and sensitive guy I was lucky to find.
Is a fitness journey is supposed to include metrics? how far can you run now? how high can you jump? what can you bench, bro? If you’ve read this far you know it’s not really about that stuff so much. I don’t care about my “one-rep max” (I don’t even know what they are actually) or any of that. Mostly, I’ve just been lucky to have received some education and encouragement and above all instruction that enables me to avoid injury and hopefully keep my joints working for a long time. I’ve now got a baseline of strength, stability and knowledge that will hopefully serve me the the rest of my life. Perhaps most importantly, I have learned that it is not just me as a middle-aged skinny guy who is in a unique situation in terms of fitness and exercise. Everyone has their own unique bodies and challenges and we are all in our own lanes doing our thing. We all do have excuses (no excuses bro!) and that’s okay. It’s okay to skip a day (or a week!) occasionally. And the more I remind myself of this the easier it becomes to carve out my own space at my own time and ignore some of those feelings of inadequacy that still sometimes come up.
I know that the requisite self-congratulatory posture of anyone’s “fitness journey” is annoying. I mentioned before but it’s worth repeating: health is a privilege. I will never ever shame somebody who doesn’t have the time or means or desire or capacity for exercise. After all, that was me for much of my life. Still, I discovered that it was not too hard to trade three or four hours of doom-scrolling for three or four hours at the gym every week, and to invest in a personal trainer rather than another iPhone upgrade. And if sharing this helps somebody else do that I think it’s worth sharing.
Thankfully, the expectation that creativity and living in a relatively healthy way are mutually exclusive seems to be changing, however slowly. While I am at the gym I am bemused by the diversity of people and attitudes and all the particular and peculiar individual approaches to fitness. But I mostly just keep to myself and do my thing. That’s what artists are good at anyway.
Let's not forget the often overlooked physical benefits of casual play. Something as simple as enjoying throwing a frisbee around with a small group of friends easily turns into sprints, hard throws, and 1000s of jumps week after week. Next thing you know, you can dunk a basketball when that was never the goal.