Meditating On 12 Years Of Fitness Blogging
I always keep on writing.
I’ve been writing for this blog for over a decade. I think, realistically, I’ll keep doing it in some form or another until I die.
I couldn’t say why that is.
I don’t think, at times, that it’s the best use of my time in terms of growing or developing my business - realistically, I know it isn’t. I get a much better return in terms of finding clients from managing ads and social media, and developing connections with real human beings. The vast majority of people who pay me for my services read little (if any) of my writing, and don’t watch much of my YouTube videos either.
Over time, if you generate a lot of content, more people find you. I get lots of views every single day from people who find random bits of content that I wrote four, seven, ten years ago. Sometimes it’s the stuff that you’d expect people to be interested in, and other times, it’s stuff that you’d not imagine ANYONE would be interested in.
But I kept on writing.
I’ve changed massively as a person over the course of my time writing for this blog that I’ve made. I started out just out of university with minimal experience working with clients, just writing about things that interested me in fitness. Over time I started writing about all sorts of other stuff that interested me - personal finance, business, self-development, language learning, and more. I got into an entirely different career, and spent time in that before returning to fitness.
And I kept on writing.
Some days, it’s easy. Some days I know exactly what I want to write about, and it comes out as quickly as I think it. I can spend hours at a stretch, pounding out multiple posts at a time, pages and pages of content.
And other days, it’s painfully hard. I can’t focus, I get distracted, I struggle to come up with interesting topics, and I find it torturous to write about topics that I’m not interested in. Sometimes, knowing that I have to write SOMETHING, I spend hours seated in front of my computer, scanning blog and YouTube feeds for content ideas, writing down tidbits of ideas that I can use later, and stack up five or ten at a time. Other times, I run out of those ideas, or I look at them later and they feel silly and pointless.
But I kept on writing.
It’s a bit weird. I really didn’t want to get into writing non-fiction. I don’t have enough of an internal life to really want to write about my feelings or the events of my life. I think of myself as a pretty simple person - I focus on my work, I have limited desires, and I only expend as much mental effort as I have to. I mostly wanted to get to work writing fiction, but I fell into this because I knew that I needed to get my finances in order, long term, before I could really focus on it with all my energy.
It’s strange that it now absorbs so much of my mental effort. I don’t find fitness to be an “interesting” hobby, or a particularly complex one, at the end of the day. Certainly, there’s a lot of complexity, but I’m knowledgeable enough now that everything feels simple, and this makes it hard for me to understand or inhabit the mindset of someone for whom it isn’t - I can’t write the way I used to, because I’m not that person anymore. So, it’s surprisingly frustrating that I sometimes find it hard to write about fitness now - I don’t think it should be, when fitness itself now comes so naturally to me.
But I kept on writing.
The threat of AI writing has made the internet a more “blah” of a place. Everything is now AI-generated nonsense spam, SEO garbage, internet bots reacting to each other, algorithmic content designed to squeeze as much value out of us as possible. It hurts to think that, in many ways, my job is to do that, but less good - not quite as fast, not quite as tireless as a program can, even when it’s garbage.
Sartre compared nothingness, the world without human meaning imposed on it, to a sort of undifferentiated disgusting mass - like oatmeal. The internet may not be dead, in the sense of the dead internet theory, but it’s certainly more and more oatmeal every day.
And I keep on writing.
As you can probably tell, today is one of those days. The artificial deadline for getting my writing done for the week is looming, and I can’t think of anything meaningful to say. So, here you go - in the face of everything, I’m still writing. Hopefully this resonates with someone.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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