Benefits of Exercise for Writers

healthy life on vintage typewriter

Writers are by nature an introverted lot. Their careers call for them to spend the majority of their time cooped up in their homes, typing away at an article, a book, a script, or any number of other things. Obviously, this is not the profession that gets the human body up and running a lot. Writers barely get any kind of exercise per day, let alone the recommended amount. So this article seeks to change that. If you are a writer over 25, you probably know that you should exercise, but you fail to see how it can benefit you as a writer. For this purpose, read on, as the biggest benefits exercise offers writers specifically are listed.


This is the obvious one, so it gets to be covered first. It’s no secret that exercising every day makes you healthier, but it’s doubly important for professions that have you sitting at a desk all day long. This also includes telemarketers, accountants, game devs, and of course, writers. It keeps you thin, helps your breathing, and all of this can be achieved with simply running on a treadmill for 30 minutes to an hour every day. As long as you keep it up, you can maintain a healthy lifestyle no matter your profession. And if you have conditions like chronic heart failure and type 2 diabetes, you too can benefit greatly from regular exercise. In the past, people with these conditions were advised against exercise, but that has proven to be untrue. Exercise is a necessary part of the human body’s health, regardless of your physical condition.

Improves Your Mood

writer stretching in front of laptop to take a little breakRead anything by Poe, Lovecraft, Shelly, or Gaiman, and you’ll know that writers aren’t the cheeriest lot. They often spend their days whiling away the hours, contemplating the human condition and slowly going mad from their inability to convey such contemplation in a paragraph. This can be kind of a downer, so there’s nothing like a good morning jog to brighten your mood, especially if you like jogging with your significant other, friends, or dog. So whenever the complexities and eternal gaping pit of human existence has got you down, get some fresh air with your fellow human beings.

Helps Inspiration

It’s the old adage: write what you know. But how can you know anything if you aren’t experiencing the world around you? The internet helps, certainly, but it can only tell you so much. It can’t compare to actually going out and meeting people out in the world, or having different experiences in that world. And when you have those experiences and meet those people, which will inspire you to write better than any fellow artist’s work. A writer reads books in order to get better at writing books. Experiencing the real world is how a writer learns what they want to write books about.

Helps Creativity

There are lots of things that can boost your creativity: books, movies, and video games can give you ideas for story concepts you can bend to your liking, scenic locales from across the world can inspire you to incorporate such elements into your work. However, nothing quite gets the creative juices flowing like a good healthy workout. So long as you don’t tire yourself out too much and keep it all in healthy moderation, you should be able to perfectly balance exercise and writing into one day without absolutely destroying your energy in the process. This may not work the first or second time, however, as your body will need time to adjust to this new schedule. Just make sure that you keep at it.

Improves Brain Activity

male writer looks inspired writing in a cafeFor reasons that science has yet to fully discern, regular exercise has been linked to the restructuring of the brain and its activities, particularly in regards to emotional states like depression. As far as we know, exercise improves the flow of blood to the brain, which helps new blood vessels grow faster and stronger and also results in the creation of more brain cells. Not only can it help you with any depression you may have, it can heavily improve your memory and even help your brain process information faster and more efficiently, meaning you learn and internalize faster and better. For a writer, these skills are invaluable, so be sure to get regular exercise to take advantage of them.

Fewer Fat Cells

Obesity is by far the main thing that all writers suffer from. After all, when your job requires you sit down for most of the day, you’re liable to gain a few pounds. And not only that, it can weaken your hip muscles and bones from underuse. Undergoing regular aerobic training helps the body burn off carbohydrates and fat. On top of that, the cardiovascular system is significantly improved, meaning more oxygen can be delivered throughout the body at one time. This allows our body to better metabolize more body fat at one time. And with those fat cells gone, your body weight begins decreasing.

Not only does being less fat lower your weight, it also helps your overall health improve, since your cardiovascular system now has more oxygen to feed the cells, leading to a strengthened immune system. This is one of the best reasons one can think of for why a writer needs to get out there and get exercising.

In conclusion, writing may mean a lot of sitting down, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit down even when you’re not writing. Regular exercise can strengthen your immune system, slim your figure, help your inspiration, make you more creative in your work, improve your overall mood, and much, much more. So if you’re a writer, and you think you could stand to jog or lift weights a bit more, don’t wait another minute. Take your dog for a morning jog and plan on doing so every morning so you can get to the next chapter of that book recharged and ready to make a best seller.