Let’s talk warm-ups and cool-downs, shall we?

If you are anything like me, you might roll your eyes at the mere mention of a warm-up before exercise and generally forget to complete a cool-down afterwards. In all honesty, I never used to really believe they were necessary (largely, I think, because when I very first started running, I was in my twenties and could happily run ten miles on stone-cold legs, mildly sleep-deprived from the night before and having had cold pizza and some sort of energy drink for breakfast without the slightest ill-effect. Ah, youth). 

Getting back into running at various points in my mid to late thirties, I found that distances I’d once covered fairly comfortably were suddenly very, very challenging, and not just because of my cardio fitness (or lack thereof). It seemed as if after every workout I would ache for days, and not in a satisfying, ‘ooh I can tell I’ve done something productive’ sort of a way, but in a ‘help, I can’t quite get up’ sort of a way. My knees ached. My hip ached. My lower back kept pinging and twinging alarmingly.

I was disheartened. Maybe I just couldn’t maintain a regular running practice anymore?

During the pandemic, I began running again after my husband and I bought a treadmill. I already had the Peloton app downloaded on my phone, so I started taking running classes with various instructors. And without fail, each and every one of them would remind me, upon starting a running workout, how important it was to warm up and cool down. 

I don’t know if it was the fact it was someone else telling me to do it, or the fact I’d had to begrudgingly admit my physical capabilities were not what they were as a cold-pizza-scoffing, Red-Bull-swilling twenty-something, but I started to take their advice and do a proper warm-up and cool-down each time I ran.

Reader, it helped.

I now am massively less achy, and my knees and hips considerably less grumbly. I seem to recover quickly after each run, meaning that I’m not cursing under my breath if I am running again the next day. Did warming up and cooling down magic me back into my twenty-something physicality? No. Did it solve all my running problems? Again, no.

What it did do, however, was to make me physically and mentally better prepared, and speed my recovery. 

As a writer, one of my biggest obstacles is knowing quite where to begin: sometimes I feel like I don’t have any ideas; sometimes I have snippets wafting about, insubstantial and refusing to take form; sometimes I have lots of ideas but don’t know where to place my focus, and so end up darting about inefficiently, getting little done and ultimately feeling frustrated.

Does any of this sound familiar?

If so, you might benefit from adding a warm-up and cool-down to your creative sessions. Don’t worry: this won’t eat into the precious time you have clawed back from your day for your writing: we’re talking about a few minutes, though you can certainly spend longer if you have the option to do so.

Writing Warm-Ups

The goal here is to ‘warm the brain’, so that you’re not launching into your WIP imagination-cold, half-asleep, or annoyed about that thing that person just said on Twitter. It’s a chance to drop the constraints of the rest of your day and immerse yourself into a creative, imaginative space.

Some suggestions for quick writing warm-ups:

Free-writing, journaling, ‘morning’ pages (as outlined in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s way)

Word-storming: start with a single descriptive word (this could be connected to your WIP, or just chosen at random; apps like BrainSparker or WordPalette  are good for this) and make as many connections as you can, working outwards from the initial word until you have a page teeming with language. You can use a thesaurus to identify synonyms and antonyms, include snippets of memory the words evoke, reference works of literature, art, music… whatever comes to mind. 

Wordle (yes, really!) It’s fun, makes you think, signals to your brain ‘we’re in language territory now’ and you can only play one round at a time, so you won’t get sucked into playing for ages instead of writing.

Read a poem or a randomly selected page from a novel. List the vocabulary which speaks to you in some way. (You might be inspired to make connections, using these words as starting points, as you might when Word-storming). Spend a few moments considering the meaning of the text and thinking about the use of language and its effect upon you. 

You may find that something comes up during your warm-up which is directly related to your WIP— in that case, wonderful— but don’t worry if this doesn’t happen. A warm-up can stand alone. Its goal is to get you into that creative mindspace. 

Writing Cool-Downs

When I was teaching, towards the end of each lesson, I would have my students reflect on the outcomes of the session: did they feel they had met the objective for the lesson? If they felt they had, how did they know this (i.e. what demonstrable skills/knowledge/understanding/product did they now have as a result)? If not, what actions/focus should they concentrate upon in the next session? What went well? What didn’t go so well?

In one of my Peloton cool-down runs recently, the instructor was talking about the value of assessing a workout in similar terms: What went well? What was challenging? What will you do differently next time?

I believe there’s enormous value in applying these three questions to our creative work after we complete a writing session. The good news is: you don’t have to do this at your desk, immediately afterwards; if you’ve got places to be, people to see, cats screaming to be fed (just me?!) then go, hence, do what must be done. All you need to do is ponder these questions three in your lovely head as you go about the rest of your day. What went well? What was challenging? What will I do differently next time?  If you feel like it, you could write your reflections down, but, even if you just contemplate these prompts, you’ll have deepened your awareness of your own writing practice and inclinations, and can use this information to help you move more effectively towards your creative goals.

For example, this is my reflection from this morning, when I worked on some ideas for poetry in the wee hours (thanks, insomnia).

“What went well?”

I made some interesting connections between central themes in a poem which I hadn’t considered before.

“What was challenging?”

Articulating the quality of a particular sensation (floating in the sea) in a less predictable way

“What will I do differently next time?”

Spend longer with the ideas incubation, rather than leaping into forcing a very loose idea into lines. I needed to give some of the images in my head room to develop through word-storming, perhaps some visual collage, etc.

There it is: I’ve made my case for incorporating warm-ups and cool-downs into your creative writing routine. 

As ever, as with any writing advice— pick up what works for you and leave the rest. Lean into the systems and methods which work best for you— that’s how the real magic will happen.

If you do include warm-ups and/or cool-downs in your creative practice and find them useful, do get in touch and let me know what this looks like for you. I’d love to hear more about your creative process.

Happy Writing!