I’ve been in a creative rut for a while. Part of it relates to being overworked (by my own choosing, to be clear), but I think part of it goes deeper than that.
Knowing how much background information to include in your content is a persistent issue when writing anything in the fitness space. If you include too much, better-informed readers will generally check out before they make it to the interesting parts of an article, because they’ll assume the whole article is just rehashing information they already know. However, if you include too little background information, people who’ve consumed less fitness content may feel lost.
That’s relevant, because I’ve had a major project hanging over my head for about six years at this point: writing the second editions of the Art and Science of Lifting. I’m hesitant to write standalone articles, because a lot of the article content would be covered in the books. However, attempts at writing the books haven’t gone well, due to the aforementioned issue related to background information. More often than not, the relevant background information for a particular topic falls into two discrete buckets:
1) Basic science stuff – can I assume the reader knows the basics of respiration, muscle physiology, biomechanics, etc.?
2) Other broad fitness-related subjects – if I want to write about training volume, the effect of volume will interact with training age, intensity, frequency, exercise selection, etc. Can I assume the reader has a basic understanding of all of those other topics, or do I need to briefly explain the relevant bits before actually diving into the subject of training volume?
I’ve wanted the second edition of Art and Science to be a resource that doesn’t go over anyone’s head (i.e. I don’t want lack of background info to be a barrier for readers), but I also want it to go into enough depth that more advanced readers will still learn new things and benefit from reading it. That presented me with a problem: where should I start?
Books are generally meant to be consumed sequentially. However, I haven’t been able to hammer out an order of topics for the book, such that one topic builds on the next, and earlier topics don’t require information from later topics in order to be fully explained. For example, if I wanted to write a chapter about training volume, a chapter about training intensity, and a chapter about training frequency, I’m not sure how to fully explain volume without the supposition that people already understand at least a bit about intensity and frequency, I’m not sure how I’d fully explain intensity without the supposition that people already understand at least a bit about volume and frequency, etc. There is obviously an established method for tackling this problem (explain the bare minimum required about later topics in order to discuss the main topic of a chapter, and then dig into the other topics in more depth later on), but I find that to be an inelegant solution. I also just found myself needing to go into so much depth about forthcoming topics that I didn’t have much left to say about those topics later.
So, I’ve decided to opt for a completely different approach. Since so many fitness-related topics are interconnected, I’ve decided to expand the project considerably, and to publish it as a knowledge base. To start with, I’ll probably use Obsidian (hat tip to Brian Minor for telling me about Obsidian). I think this will effectively solve the “background info” problem. All necessary background information for any high-level topic will be self-contained within the knowledge base, so people who need to read the background information will be able to easily access it, and people who don’t need to read any background information on a particular topic can forge right ahead.
Of course, such an approach will require me to actually write the background information for all of the subjects I’d like to discuss. So, for now, that’s what I’ll be working on. It’ll start with a musculoskeletal anatomy database, upon which I’ll build an exercise database. Then, I’ll need to write some textbook-style content covering exercise physiology and biomechanics. And then I’ll be able to dig into subjects directly related to getting strong and jacked. So, this will be a pretty big project, but once it’s done, it’ll be an interconnected framework where you can start at any node in the network, and take yourself on a little journey through my brain. Ultimately, I want the knowledge base to contain virtually everything I know about lifting, arranged in a logical and easily navigable way.
Working on the knowledge base will also let me spend more of my time doing one of the things I find most fulfilling about my work: making evergreen content that can benefit a lot of people for a long time. I’ve spent most of the past few years answering one-off messages or working on paywalled content for MASS. My overall volume of work output has been very high, but only a small minority of the people who follow my work have seen a significant fraction of my total output. In keeping with the theme of my last post on here, I’m trying to be intentional about spending more of my time doing things that will be more beneficial to more people. I think a comprehensive knowledge base will ultimately have a far greater impact than a bunch of disconnected articles, or even a fresh pair of books. It’ll take a lot more work, obviously, but I think it’ll be worth it.