WRITER'S WORKOUT
Against the buffed twink aesthetic. Bring the real men back!
After I posted a video of me swinging a mace in our backyard — preparing for our NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS LIVE! event — I got a quite a few guys getting in touch to ask about the exercise. Why was I doing it? What good was it for? Will it help with my back? With my shoulder pain? All good questions.
Seems like all the big political influencers are doing fitness advice now so I figured I’d use this as an opportunity to jump in, too. To talk about my own approach to fitness — a Writer’s Workout.
As far as the mace goes, I have to say — probably yes to all those questions. The mace swing is a great full body exercise. It warms up and stretches your lats and pecs, gets the shoulder joint moving, activates the triceps and rotator cuff and scapular muscles, and hits almost every muscle group from your fingers to your wrists to your core and back and forces you to stabilize your body…so the movement goes all the way down to your toes. It’s not the it exercise but it’s a great one, especially if you’re feeling stiff. The thing about this mace thing is that a swing like that doesn’t just strengthen, it builds coordination between muscle groups — your arms and shoulders and back and legs and core they all have to work together and so it makes your muscles more efficient at moving through their range of motion. So a lot of the increased strength you’ll feel after doing this for a few weeks (like the ability to do more pushups and pull ups) might actually be newfound solidarity between your nervous system and your muscles.
If you’re gonna do it be careful, especially if you’re stiff and have shoulder mobility issues. Start with a very light weight — like 5 lbs — build the coordination and move up from there once you get the hang of it. And don’t sue me if you crack your skull open or bludgeon your partner to death (accidentally of course).
Why do I do this exercise? It fits in with my general workout philosophy — a way to stay fit while living the sedentary urban life of a writer and not really obsessing over it. I cobbled this approach together over the years — first to rehabilitate my wrecked shoulder joints and then to try to stave off degeneration that comes with age and with hours and hours spent hunched over a desk writing. My thinking on workouts crystallized during covid, too — when I stopped going to the gym and worked out at home while we were on lockdown stuck in LA and when I watched the fitness influencer trend go through the roof. It seemed everyone was turning into a body builder and the algorithm began pushing workout vids and ridiculously swole and perfectly chiseled bodies into all our feeds, pushing workouts and products and perfect bodies and lots of modified bullshit.
For me the two things evolved together antagonistically: the toxic fantasy body image stuff online vs my own experience with shoulder rehab and my evolving ideas about beauty standards, aesthetics, and the human body. I’ve developed what I call a WRITER’S WORKOUT. Low effort, moderate gains!
I think its appeal goes beyond just the writer set. Everyone is a “writer” now — everyone sits at their computer, everyone is constantly hunched over typing in their phones, everyone has back and shoulder problems…
BEFORE and AFTER
(Disclaimer: Costumes used to dramatize transformation for effect. Gains maybe not be reproducible in real life.)
Do full body/multi-muscle group workouts. Minimize and avoid static workout machines as much as possible. For muscle building to be beneficial, it should be holistic — that is, it should mimic as closely as possible real movements that you would perform in the real world. We never move just one muscle or one group of muscles — we activate our entire body. Workout machines that isolate muscles do the opposite and so can create an imbalance, which leads to injury later on. Static workout machines also waste your time. Because you have to focus on every muscle group separately you end up spending hours in the gym. So static exercises are doubly shitty: they are unnatural and waste time. (The only time you should isolate muscles is when you’re doing physical therapy and are trying to fix a muscle imbalance or some other kind of injury.)
Try to exercise outside. Avoid the gym unless you really have no choice. Working out outside is free and pleasant and you don’t need much: a couple of kettlebells, a pull up bar, a few rubber bands — as an extra bonus maybe some gymnastic rings that you can hang. You can do it in your back yard and most cities have some kind of outdoor workout stations, although never enough. (I think.there are two pull up bars in the entire Central Park.) You can lug your gear there and workout outside and meet your neighbors. The sunlight and fresh air will be as good for you as the workouts — a big difference from the fluorescent lights and recirculated air you get in gyms.
Train for strength and feeling good in your body rather than for a “look.” I know this will get me a lot of hate from the guys, but building muscles for looks is for losers. Sculpting your body to look swole and obsessing about the shape of your muscles is closer to getting breast implants than anything else and smells of desperation. It shows that you’re self-conscious, obsessed with your image and lack confidence. Whether you’re chunky or skinny, as long as you’re strong and healthy you’ll look good without trying to force yourself to pursue some Men’s Health/underwear model/buffed twink ideal that’s not attainable by most people anyway and is not even desirable by the ladies who don’t care about these things. The buff culture is men performing for other men. We not all auditioning for the X-Men. And anyway I think the current fad in hyper-sculpted modded bodies will be looked at in the future with not a little contempt. It signals a very strange moment in human society — a symptom of atomized lonely individuals obsessively and compulsively working on themselves, trying to maintain an illusion of power and control, dosing with highly processed supplements made in labs, sourced from global ingredients. What people should be doing instead are “working out” in the fields, growing their own food…getting strong through embodied labor rather than whatever this is.
Thinking about this program — this is a very socialist kind of workout: communal, anti-consumerist, anti-commercial, focused on health and wellbeing over looks. And it’s how men in the Soviet Union worked out. Pretty much every man had a set of kettlebells. That’s how the kettlebells arrived in the United States — brought here by Soviet immigrants.
I started developing my own personal workout routine about a decade ago while trying to rehabilitate my wrecked shoulder joints — which I destroyed back in my late teens after several bad snowboard falls and a motorcycle crash when I was twenty. I was young and dumb and tried to ignore my injuries. I thought they’d go away and heal on their own. The joints didn’t heal — or they did but they healed badly. The trauma in my joints basically became fixed. I had been very active before that and because of the injuries my physical activity came to a stop. So I drank a lot and took a lot of drugs to take my mind off the problem. And more I didn’t pay attention, the weaker and more unstable my joints got. It got so bad that I’d wake up in the morning and find out that I had put my hand behind my head at night — a movement that was enough to pop my shoulder out of its socket. So I’d spend the first ten minutes of that morning unable to move because of the extreme pain, slowly twisting my body to get the head of the humeral bone to snap back into the joint, all while in immense pain. Or I’d dislocate my shoulder just with a simple fall — like I did when I slipped on some ice while spending New Year’s Eve with my friend Spencer in the Czech Republic and then proceeded to get as drunk as possible so not to think about the pain and weakness in my arm and how I’d be out of commission for a few weeks after that, all while he was having fun trying to pick up Czech girls. I felt as frail as an eighty year old while I wasn’t even twenty-five yet. But I never told anyone about it. I even played it down for Evgenia. Admitting it to others would be admitting it to myself…admitting that I’m a minor invalid. And that’s not how I saw myself. I hit a low point when Evgenia and I were living in Santa Monica. We had gone up to Tahoe where my brother and his friends were renting a house and I slipped on some ice getting into our car. I fell and dislocated my shoulder right there while we were on our way to hit the slopes, ending my first attempt at winter sports in more than fifteen years before I even got back on the mountain. It sad and was pathetic. But I couldn’t deny it anymore. It was then that I started to take my injury seriously. I found a great physical therapist and over the course of a few years I was able to bring myself back to the level of strength that I had in my teens.
It was during my rehabilitation process, when I started crafting my own routine, that I began to think about my workout philosophy. It emerged as a mix of calisthenics and natural body movements with and without weights. I got a lot of results out of it. I didn’t get jacked. But I went from being unable to hang on a pull-up bar because it would dislocate my shoulder to doing very basic gymnastic movements — and I was past my mid-30s at that point.
That’s me six years ago. Not fitness influencer level fit but pretty good for someone who used to pop his shoulder out at the slightest touch. I’m not a fetishist. I’m not trying to be a gymnast as a midlife crisis. That’ll end in disaster. But doing this kind of swinging exercise on the rings showed me how much I had progressed in terms of shoulder strength and mobility. I don’t have super defined muscles and I do have fat on my belly. And why shouldn’t I have fat on my belly? I’m middle aged and read and write for a living. But I feel good and I can carry my daughter around for hours and hours. What else do I need?
Maybe I’ll post some exercise tips, if the people demand them!
—Yasha
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I just like the gopniki three stripe threads with huaraches... friendship of the peoples!
Sort of rambling here but just my 2 cents:
I'm sort of where you are when you started your journey during the pandemic. I think getting back into shape can be difficult. I was fairly athletic when I was a teenager, but not so much now. It can be difficult to get into a routine, especially with all of the shit we all have to deal with day in/day out. I'm currently dealing with that right now
There is a whole subculture of fitness influencers online. Some of them are actually ok, but many are not, and obviously everyone is there to get clicks, so you have to be careful.
I haven't done the mace workout in your video, but something similar with clubs is getting more popular online. I think it's a persian thing?
I discovered kettlebells a few years ago, and as you say they were brought here by immigrants from the former USSR. Pavel Tsatsouline is the probably the biggest name in that world. They are a simple, functional, and cheap way to get in shape. It's interesting how popular they have become. I wish I had learned about them sooner.
Point 1 about multi-muscle group workouts is now becoming the norm I think, at least from what I see online.
Gyms *can* be a positive. For someone just starting out, they can be good for learning correct form etc. Also can meet new people, do classes etc.