Strength Training for Creatives

The things we do in support of the THING

The post below popped up in my Instagram feed recently, and it hit just a little too close to home:

I’m a few weeks into half marathon training for a race in November, and I know that it’s important to supplement my running with strength work and stretching, but knowing and doing aren’t always perfectly aligned.

It seems like a bigger, more tangible thing to rack up those miles on the long run each week. After all, I’m training to run a race, so I should be running, right? However, what I know from experience, and what my internet friend Montana¹ was humorously nudging at with her post here, is that things like strength training, and stretching, and foam rolling are all in support of the running. Without these supports there is a good chance the big goal of those 13.1 miles might never happen.

The same applies to our creative work.

It’s easy to focus on the essay, the book, the sculpture, the cake, the hand-thrown bowl, the song, the photograph. The thing that goes out in the world. The one that people see. The final product.²

But what are the unseen things that we do in support of the marathon of sustainable creativity? Here are a few that come to mind for me:

1. White space. Downtime. Not doing. Whatever you want to call the act of stepping away to percolate on ideas or allow new ones to bubble up. Sure, this can be big, planned-out things like vacations or long weekends away, but it can also be taking a walk, sipping coffee, and staring out the window. Even hopping in the shower or taking a bath. (There is a reason this product exists for us to jot down those ideas we get in the shower.) Stepping away frees up space in our brains to think about something from a different angle. See it in a new light. Interrupt the patterns that aren’t working or notice the ones that are. It’s hard to see anything clearly when you’re in the middle of creating it. Space and time away, even the tiniest bit, helps.

2. Consuming other art. It could be a play or a concert or an exhibit at a gallery. A poem or an essay. A pastry from the little bakery down the street. A meal your friend prepared. Anything created with intention and expression, really. It’s important to remember how a created Thing can make you feel. Make you react. Make you ask questions. It’s imperative to remember that there is power in the things we make that extends beyond us. It’s the inspiration to continue the making.

3. Deadlines. Or call them constraints if that feels more generative and less like drudgery. Nothing supports my creation of these weekly essays more than the contract I’ve set with each of you (my wonderful, amazing readers!) by explaining on the About page that I’ll deliver one to you each week. I’d spin my wheels about topics and analyze every word to perfection and write approximately one essay a year if I didn’t have this. And I’d also lose all the practice that comes from the regular habit of creating. Is every essay my favorite thing I’ve ever written? Nope. Am I honing my craft each week? Absolutely.

It’s easy to ignore these things. Brush them aside because they aren’t the capital letter T, thing we’re creating. But just like running without strength training can stop a training season short, skipping what nurtures our creativity can lead to burnout. We need the balance of bringing the supportive stuff alongside the main thing. Not as an afterthought, a maybe sometimes if I have time, but instead as an inseparable part of the process.

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Beautiful Thing of the Week

Just a little something I loved:

📙 This article from

Anne Helen Petersen

about nostalgia for a time less connected, which I read just after I wrote a similar piece about that summer in college when I listened to music in the dark. It’s always just a little bit magical to know we’re feeling the same things as someone else at exactly the same time.

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Would love to hear from you! What strength training do you do in support of sustained creativity? Have you read something recently that just made you feel so very understood?

Be well, find tiny joy-

Mary Chris

1. Highly recommend giving Montana DePasquale a follow if you are a runner. She offers super practical advice for strength training and nutrition, and always seems to provide the truth when I've been in a phase of ignoring it.

2. Per se, as we all know, art is never finished; it is only ever declared "done enough.”