Uncategorized

April 22, 2012

Interview with Bestselling Fitness Author Lou Schuler

In my continuing efforts to expose the readers of my blog to top people in the fitness field, here is an interview I did with bestselling fitness author and award-winning journalist, Lou Schuler. Lou is someone I respect both professionally and personally, and he’s one of the few people around writing high quality consumer-oriented fitness books. He’s well-read on exercise and fitness, and conveys practical information in a very engaging manner. I’m sure you’ll get that sense from reading his responses to my questions. Enjoy!

BJS: You started out as a newspaper journalist. How did you get into writing about fitness?

Lou Schuler: It goes back to 1989. I had just gotten a job for a brand-new daily paper, the St. Louis Sun. I was a feature writer, so I wrote a lot about lifestyle trends. Health clubs were pretty common by then, and lots of people were at least interested in working out, even if relatively few people actually did.

I was 32, and I’d been working out since I was 13. I had no idea what I was doing most of that time, but it was something I’d done for so long that it was a big part of my identity.

The newspaper business, traditionally, has not been conducive to healthy lifestyles. Even in 1989 it was still pretty unusual for a writer to not smoke, not drink very much, and spend a big chunk of his free time working out.

So whenever we needed a story that was related to health or fitness, I got the assignment. Honestly, I didn’t consider those stories any more important than anything else I wrote about – dating, nightlife, entertainment, whatever.

The Sun went out of business in 1990, and in the fall of 1991 I started grad school for creative writing at USC. I was just terrifyingly broke. I was paying my rent with a credit card. I thought I’d be able to get a job waiting tables or tending bar while I got my master’s degree, but there was a recession in L.A., and even the places that were hiring didn’t want to work around my class schedule.

Sometime that fall I answered a blind ad in the L.A. Times for an editor at a fitness magazine. It turned out to be Men’s Fitness, which I’d never heard of. I used my clips from the Sun as writing samples, and that’s what got me in the door for an interview. I didn’t get the job that was advertised, but I got some freelance assignments, and then a part-time copyediting job at Muscle & Fitness, and finally a full-time job at Men’s Fitness in early 1992.

I was promoted to fitness editor three years later, and then I moved across the country to work for Men’s Health in 1998.

BJS: You were a top editor at popular magazines such as “Men’s Fitness” and “Men’s Health” for many years. Any reflections on that experience? Do you miss it?

Lou Schuler: I don’t miss being in an office. I was involved in way too many things, and I think it was clear I needed to get out on my own and focus on the things I do best.

The one part I do miss is feeling that I’m on top of everything – that I’m reading all the latest studies, that I’m going to the right conferences, that I’m identifying the coaches and trainers with interesting new ideas and finding ways to get them into the mix.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to get back to that, in a limited way, in the past couple of years, writing and editing articles for Men’s Health.

Writing for magazines is limited by space and format, and you can’t really appreciate how challenging it is until you work on both ends – writing and editing.

The good thing about magazines is the way you’re forced to zero in on what’s immediately useful to a reader. The tough part is knowing the reader would get more benefit with more information. You have to make a lot of judgment calls.

That’s also true of books, by the way, where you have hundreds of pages to work with. You still have to choose what you think will help readers most, and cut out the rest.

BJS: You are super knowledgeable about exercise and nutrition. How do you stay on top of current research?

Lou Schuler: Brad, you’re being way too kind! I think a better way to phrase the question is, “You aren’t a complete idiot when it comes to exercise and nutrition. How do you maintain your non-stupidity?”

I get the best information and insight at conferences. If it’s just me reading journals, keeping up with blogs like yours, and following along with the New York Times and the other daily media, I get an overview of some things that some people have decided are important.

But when I go to a conference, I get to hear what researchers talk about when they sit down with other researchers. They’re looking at their own field in a way that’s fundamentally different from the way outsiders report on their field.

Here’s a very specific example: I attended the NSCA sport-specific conference in 2003 in New Orleans. It was the first time I’d heard Mark Verstegen present. His topic was rotational training, and almost every exercise he showed in the presentation was new to me. My first thought was, “We have to get this stuff in the magazine.” I introduced myself to him after his talk, then ran up to my hotel room and emailed a couple of editors at MH. I said we have to work with this guy.

The upshot, interestingly enough, wasn’t a magazine feature. It was the Core Performance book that Mark wrote with Pete Williams. When the proposal came in from Mark’s agent, a couple of us pushed hard to get the deal for Rodale (the company that owns Men’s Health). I ended up editing the book. It worked out great for everyone.

That’s not a story about research so much as identifying someone who had fresh, exciting ideas, and coming away from the conference knowing I’d seen something new that I just had to share with readers.

BJS: Your “New Rules…” series has been wildly successful. What motivated you to write the first book in the series, “New Rules of Lifting for Men”?

Lou Schuler: That’s a fun story. The original title of the book was Basic Training. I’d spent my career as a fitness editor searching out new ideas that, ultimately, made lifting more complicated. So Alwyn Cosgrove and I talked about how simple we could make it. Could we narrow down all exercises to a handful of movement categories?

The goal was to get lifters away from the idea of “body parts” and get them to focus on the big picture – the exercises that use the most muscle in ways that come closest to basic human movements. People like Paul Chek had been talking about this idea, and Alwyn was already using it to train his clients. But it was new to me, and I thought readers would respond to it.

As it turned out, there was another workout book with that same title. It was going to come out before ours. We needed a new title, and everyone liked New Rules of Lifting.

Now, it’s interesting that you refer to it as “New Rules of Lifting for Men.” Obviously, it was written for men, because that’s the audience I’d always written for. But as soon as it came out in January 2006, I got questions from women asking why I’d excluded them.

There aren’t many things that catch me completely by surprise, but that was one of them.

BJS: You followed that first book up with “New Rules of Lifting for Women.” In what ways do you feel that women need to train differently than men?

Lou Schuler: I’d read a couple of textbooks to get my training certifications, I’d gone to conferences for years, and I’d been in weight rooms where elite male and female athletes were training. Nothing I’d read or seen suggested that women should train differently for the same goals. Certainly Alwyn and Rachel Cosgrove don’t train women differently from men at Results Fitness.

I just thought women wanted to train differently. You know, purely a cultural thing.

But when I started getting all these questions, from readers as well as the media, I thought, well, why not write a book for women who want to train like men?

The original title was Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess. People either loved it or hated it.

After the book was finished, edited, and photographed, the sales staff at Penguin petitioned our editor to change the title. They said, “We’ve done okay with New Rules of Lifting. Why create a completely new branding for this book, when we could make it part of a franchise that’s already off to a pretty good start?”

So I went back and, again to my surprise, it took hardly any rewriting and restructuring to put it into the New Rules format. A lot of the rules were already there in chapter titles and subheads. It was just a matter of moving type around. So I’d written it as a New Rules book without meaning to.

Changing the title was a great call all around. NROL for Women came out in 2008, and it’s the most popular book in the series so far. It wouldn’t have had nearly the same impact with the original title.

BJS: You just released the fourth book in the series, “New Rules of Lifting for Life.” Who is the target audience and how does this one differ from previous books?

Lou Schuler: As with NROL for Women, this book is entirely demand-driven. I’ve always resisted the idea that men and women in middle age needed a book of our own. Readers convinced me otherwise.

Readers kept asking how to modify programs for age. I kept saying, no, you don’t have to change anything. You just have to be smarter. Be more careful. Take more time to recover if you need it. But don’t change the program just because you’re 45 and you think it’s written for someone who’s 25.

There was another type of question that came from people who were extremely overweight, or who were rehabbing an injury, or who had some kind of illness that changed what they could do in the weight room. I don’t give medical advice, but I always tried to help those readers however I could.

Then I had a light-bulb moment: All these readers were asking the exact same question: How do I train when I’m not like all the other people in the gym?

The solution was relatively simple once I’d identified the problem, and it was right in front of us the whole time.

When Alwyn and Rachel and their staff train clients, they work from a template. The workout is presented as a series of movement patterns – which of course is the basis of all our books – along with parameters for sets and reps. They select exercises based on what works best for the individual client in that part of the program.

So if someone has knee issues, but no upper-body problems, that client might be restricted to extremely basic exercises in the squat and lunge movement patterns, while doing more advanced upper-body pushes and pulls.

This is exciting for us on two levels. First, we allow readers to decide for themselves what they’re able and ready to do. Second, it comes closer to the way Alwyn actually trains clients.

A book can never replicate that experience directly – a good trainer is always going to see problems we don’t see in ourselves, and make adjustments that wouldn’t occur to us. But it comes just a bit closer.

BJS: What is the single most important piece of advice you can give someone who wants to attain a fit body?

Lou Schuler: You have to work hard, and you have to work consistently. That means you have to find something you enjoy enough, and that you find interesting enough, to keep you going back to it. It also has to be something that lends itself to steady improvement over time.

It has to engage your mind in a way that allows it to be fully separate from the rest of your life, but not disrupt your life. In other words, when you’re doing it, you forget about work. But when you’re finished with it, you can get right back into the flow of your job or your family or World of Warcraft or whatever.

For me, and for you, and for most of the people reading this, strength training meets those criteria. It’s a perfect hour-long break in the middle of my workday. For someone else, it might be a perfect start to a day, or a perfect finish.

We both know that trends change over the years, and sometimes research points us in new directions. But what never changes is the importance of effort. Get the work done and you’ll be pleased with the results.

BJS: Great stuff, Lou. Many thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas with my readers!

For further info, check out Lou’s blog at: LouSchuler.com

Check out Lou’s new book at: The New Rules of Lifting for Life