{"id":5436,"date":"2023-12-19T09:40:19","date_gmt":"2023-12-19T13:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/applying-the-six-principles-of-athletic-training-to-writing-and-creative-work-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-12-19T09:40:19","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T13:40:19","slug":"applying-the-six-principles-of-athletic-training-to-writing-and-creative-work-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/applying-the-six-principles-of-athletic-training-to-writing-and-creative-work-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Applying the Six Principles of Athletic Training to Writing and Creative Work \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n\n

By Maria Popova<\/h3>\n
\n

\"Working<\/a><\/p>\n

The highest and hardest task of life may be to become entirely ourselves \u2014 to continually purify and clarify who and what we are, shedding the shoulds of culture, convention, and expectation to discover the innermost musts: those deepest and truest callings of the authentic self, or what we might call soul<\/em>. And yet the great paradox is that the self is not a fixity but a perpetual fluidity, reshaped by every experience we have: every love and every loss, every person we meet, every place we visit, and every book we read. And so it must be: \u201cA self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,\u201d Virginia Woolf wrote, for she understood that the finest souls \u201care always the supplest.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

The exquisite challenge of becoming oneself but remaining supple is at the center of every life, but it is amplified in the creative life \u2014 there is no greater tragedy for an artist than to stagnate and stiffen into a fixity, a template of oneself that ceases to create and instead caters to a self-myth. \u201cAre we going to ossify,\u201d the young Emily Dickinson wrote rhetorically to her great love and muse<\/a> at the outset of an uncommonly creative life, throughout which she refused to ossify, as a person and as an artist.<\/p>\n

In Sweat<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 his magnificent history of exercise as a lens on the body and the soul<\/a> \u2014 Bill Hayes offers an uncommon antidote to ossifying, rooted in the parallels between creative practice and athletic training.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Group Apparatus<\/em> by Alice Austen<\/a>, 1893.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Drawing an analogy between the science of exercise and his own art \u2014 writing \u2014 he considers the six principles that sustain long-term personal fitness.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Principle of Specificity<\/strong> is the idea that \u201cwhat you train for is what you get\u201d \u2014 if your goal is endurance, train for endurance; if your goal is strength, train for strength; if you aim to make your prose more musical, train your mind\u2019s ear on musical writing; if you want to write better observations, train to make better observations. \u201cBe specific in your work goals as much as in your workouts,\u201d Hayes writes.<\/li>\n
  2. The Overload Principle<\/strong> requires that you \u201ctrain a part of the body above the level to which it is accustomed\u201d \u2014 it is the practice of pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone and trying new things. Hayes calls its equivalent in the mind \u201ccreative cross-training.\u201d Rilke understood this: \u201cPeople are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy,\u201d he wrote in contemplating creativity<\/a>. \u201cBut it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.\u201d<\/li>\n
  3. The Principle of Progression<\/strong> arises out of the Overload Principle, demanding that you move on as soon as you have mastered a new task. Georgia O\u2019Keeffe knew this. \u201cMaking your unknown known is the important thing,\u201d she wrote in her advice on being an artist<\/a>, \u201cand keeping the unknown always beyond you.\u201d<\/li>\n
  4. The Principle of Accommodation<\/strong> takes effect in the absence of the Progression Principle: Without challenge, the body \u2014 or the spirit \u2014 settles into stagnation or, worse, complacency. David Bowie urged against this reflex toward comfort and homeostasis: \u201cAlways go a little further into the water than you feel you\u2019re capable of being in,\u201d he advised artists<\/a>. \u201cGo a little bit out of your depth, and when you don\u2019t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you\u2019re just about in the right place to do something exciting.\u201d<\/li>\n
  5. The Principle of Reversibility<\/strong> is an admonition against the trap of accommodation \u2014 when you cease challenging yourself, the arc of your progress bends backward, undoing your gains. It almost doesn\u2019t matter what you do to keep your system from falling out of shape \u2014 it need not be your primary workout, or your primary work. Virginia Woolf felt that her informal diary writing \u201cloosens the ligaments\u201d<\/a> for her formal literary writing. \u201cOne must do something, anything, to keep the creative and intellectual motors running,\u201d Hayes writes.<\/li>\n
  6. The Principle of Rest<\/strong> may then seem like a paradox \u2014 but it is the final and in a sense the most foundational tenet of any sustained practice. Anyone who has suffered the aches and injuries of overtraining, anyone who has suffered the spiritual hollowing of burnout, knows the cost of not taking time to recover from exertion, to replenish the body\u2019s energy and the soul\u2019s store of creative vitality. \u201cJust as the body needs time to rest,\u201d writes Hayes, whose superb book The Anatomist<\/em> demanded of him a three-year recovery, \u201cso does an essay, story, chapter, poem, or especially, a book.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"\"<\/a>
    Art by Violeta L\u00f3piz from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader<\/em><\/a>. Available as a print<\/a>, benefiting The New York Public Library.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Couple with Zadie Smith on what writers can learn from dancers<\/a>, then revisit some excellent advice on writing (applicable to all creative work) from James Baldwin<\/a>, Albert Camus<\/a>, Octavia Butler<\/a>, Rachel Carson<\/a>, Rebecca Solnit<\/a>, and Mary Oliver<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"Profit<\/a>
    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Maria Popova The highest and hardest task of life may be to become entirely ourselves \u2014 to continually purify and clarify who and what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}