Sometimes I Answer My Email

I don’t always answer my email promptly, a character flaw that I’d like to correct but probably won’t anytime soon. However, I did answer a couple of random questions sent by readers this weekend, and thought I’d share the answers here. If this is something you’d like to see here, I’ll do it more often.

And if you disagree with my replies to those readers, please let me know where I’m wrong and how I should’ve answered. With both questions, I’ve done some slight editing for the usual reasons (grammar, punctuation, clarity) and to protect the correspondent’s anonymity.

I’m a newbie personal trainer working in a local gym. Whenever I try to talk to my fellow trainers about functional training and training the body as a unit vs. body-parts style, they think I’m stupid and new and just don’t get it.

I’m intimidated to train my clients in front of them, but I know that unless you’re a bodybuilder it really isn’t necessary to split your body up. I tell them that everyone should do squats and deadlifts, and they say that beginners must start on machines!

Any suggestions?

Chad Waterbury told me a great story about getting a job early in his career at a big gym in Chicago. The other trainers thought he was nuts when he had his clients doing basic strength and power exercises with free weights. But when those clients got better results than the ones who worked with the other trainers, he got promoted to head trainer.

That’s the bottom line: Who gets results?

I’m not a personal trainer — I’m CSCS, but have never trained clients in a gym, and don’t plan to — but I don’t think there’s any doctrinaire way to go about it. Some clients, especially those recovering from injuries, severely detrained, or cruelly uncoordinated, might be better off with a mix of machines and free weights until they improve their strength and muscle quality.

You’ll still have to get them off the machines as soon as you can, but for some clients it probably makes sense to let them see some kind of training effect before you start worrying about whether they’re doing functional exercises. Simply improving their strength and muscular conditioning will probably have some functional crossover.

So my advice is to do what’s right for your clients. Leave ideology out of it. Be flexible and train each client according to his or her needs, working with what you have and building up from there.

I’m 22, and plan to return to school this fall to finish my degree. I’m leaning toward journalism/advertising. Specifically, I’m interested in writing for the fitness population.

My questions: When you attended journalism school, what was your focus? Were you mainly interested in fitness writing, or writing in general? How did you go about getting writing jobs as a new, young writer?

By pure coincidence, I wrote about that in my previous post. As I explain in more detail there, I didn’t start writing about fitness until I got a job at Men’s Fitness in 1992, when I was 35 and had already put in thousands of hours writing about other subjects.

If you want to get paid as a writer, you almost certainly must have a degree in journalism. Some don’t, but those guys are exceptions. Furthermore, in my experience, there are only a handful of journalism schools that give you a leg up when it comes time to get hired. The absolute best chance you have is when you enter the job market with a master’s degree from Columbia, Northwestern, or Missouri. For undergrad, the top schools are probably Missouri, Northwestern, Ohio University, Syracuse, and Florida.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get a decent job if you don’t go to those schools. It’s just harder to get taken seriously in the job market.

Right now the entire publishing industry is contracting, due to the drop in ad revenue. But, as I wrote last week, something similar happens every 10 years. The time to get into the business is when it’s recovering from one of those contractions, which means you want to have your degree and some momentum a year or two from now, when companies start hiring again. A lot of the people who get laid off will leave the field, opening up more entry-level opportunities and more chance for advancement once you get in the door. It’s cheaper to hire entry-level writers and editors and train them up to senior level than it is to hire senior-level publishing professionals who’ve already established their bona fides.

Specializing in anything makes it more difficult. There just aren’t many full-time jobs for fitness journalists, and you have to hope one is open at the exact moment you need it. Just about everybody I know in the field stumbled into it. 

So that’s the best advice I can offer — get the degree, pursue your interests online and offline, and hope for the best when you graduate. But also keep in mind that you never really know what you want to do and what you’re good at until you’ve actually done it. I’ve seen fitness geeks who thought they’d love working at a fitness magazine but then realized they didn’t really like it at all.

There’s a lot of compromise in any branch of publishing (or in any profession, period), and some people would rather not be part of that when it comes to something they care about.

Tags: Tags: careers, email, fitness, journalism, magazines, Media, personal training