Will Learn For Food
A Worthwhile Internship In A Health Club
The last semester of college found me as an intern in a health club in Salt Lake City. I was coming out of school dirt poor, and the only real option I had for living out of state was to stay with friends during the four months of my internship. I had made some calls around the Denver area, to a couple of places in California, but mostly I focused on the Salt Lake City area because I had a place to stay with my friends Lisa and Steve.
For the most part, hosting interns in your facility is a pain, so strength coaching programs are hard to find. I happened to get lucky, though, and randomly call a big health club in Holladay one day. I told the front desk person what I was looking for and she didn’t have any idea who to send me to since the manager was out. It just happened that the head trainer, Tim, was standing near the desk that day, so she handed the phone to him. He listened to my request and asked a few questions, and then said, “Heck yeah, come on down. We’ll see you in a month.”
Four weeks later, I found myself standing in front of a huge facility that included swimming pools, tennis courts, basketball courts, aerobics rooms, and a decent weight training area. Tim was in charge of the personal training department, but really had no managerial oversight at the gym beyond that. Despite that, he had arranged a thorough schedule for me that included time in each of the departments. I had expected to just spend time with him talking about strength and conditioning, I guess, but it turned out that I got to learn about industrial appliance maintenance, resurfacing tennis courts, cleaning the swimming pool, setting up the summer youth program, teaching adult fitness classes, and more. I even had the opportunity to get certified as a step aerobics instructor…a certification that I have failed to keep up-to-date.
Many of my days would find me shadowing trainers in the weight room and working to build a training database that would allow them to program more quickly. Even though I was busy all around the facility, I still tended to have two to three hours a day of downtime. Noticing this, Tim recommended that I continue my education by reading books about training and sports. I wasn’t super excited about this as I had just finished a heavy semester of study, but I agreed. The first book that Tim had me read was Power by Fred Hatfield. I read through it slowly, and probably ten days after I started it, Tim asked if I had finished.
I told him I was almost finished, but in truth I was probably only fifty pages in. I think somehow he saw this and he said, “Okay, when you finish it, we’re going to go out to lunch and talk about it, my treat.” I thanked him and told him I would let him know when I finished, and he followed up that we should make a plan for the next Monday. This forced me to sit down and rip through the book as quickly as I could. If you’ve ever read this book, you would understand that it’s not the kind of book that one rips through.
I read during every available moment while I was at work, and then I read through most of the weekend. When Monday came around, we went out to lunch, and Tim’s first question was, “Based on what you read in the book, how should we change our training system at the gym?” I had really only been prepared to regurgitate some details of Hatfield’s work rather than to actually pull them into a training process. Naturally, I stumbled through my answer, but Tim saved me, and we eventually had a fairly deep discussion about the book.
He suggested that I could only learn so much while following various people around the facility during my remaining time in my internship. His suggestion was that we plan on having lunch every other Monday and discuss a new book. Over the next months, I dove into reading several hours each day and making copious notes. Occasionally, I would buy one of the books, but for the most part I was borrowing them from the library or from Tim’s bookshelf in the office, so I couldn’t do any highlighting in the books themselves.
Instead, I built a habit of outlining the book in a notebook and then writing down the details I learned in each chapter, and then followed that effort with writing a short synopsis so I would be able to discuss it with Tim. I read about strength training, the zone diet, Cooper’s first couple of books on aerobics, and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding.
I continued to help with the laundry, teach an occasional group fitness class, and even help with resurfacing the basketball courts. It was the every-other-Monday meetings, though, that helped launch me into the understanding that there was way more to learn beyond the degree I was about to receive. With each book, I learned just a little bit less... So many books on training and fitness are redundant in their basic structure. But what I came to understand was that the learning process could and should continue long into one’s coaching career.
Looking back on it some 30 years later, I now can see that the random call to a random facility for my internship was pivotal in building the learning habits that I have today. When it came time to try to understand training for climbing, I had a base of understanding of so many different sports that I wasn’t just stuck trying to apply strength training principles or running training principles to a sport that is nothing like either of those endeavors.
The intent to learn is essential. Even if it is done in chunks of ten minutes a day, or in a group setting, or by hiring an expert to teach you, every professional should be raging to learn at all times. I had decent training systems five years ago, and decent ones 10, 15, and 20 years ago as well. But now they are better, and the athletes that we train today are that much better off simply because I respected the craft enough to keep trying to get better. Sometimes I think that I might have found this habit on my own, but most of the time I’m pretty sure that every time I open a book, it is related to those early discussions with Tim.