Apr 11, 2008 3:34 PM

Q: Have the war in Iraq and other conflicts overseas affected Navy Fitness?

A: I wouldn’t say they’ve affected it; we’ve just had to rethink how we get stuff to people because now there is a larger portion of deployed military. We have to figure out how we get things to them—our strength equipment and things like that. We have people who will order equipment through our department, and send things over. They go through Doug Butts, he’s in charge of our fleet side, and he helped put in the orders and send equipment over there and [he will] go through a regular company or whatever vendor they’ve chosen. [Navy Fitness will] get that equipment over there, and they’ll send it out to the area. We’ve tried to create the best atmosphere we can in the hostile environments that they’re in.

Now, do you still see some areas where all they have is what they make? Well, yes, there are some remote areas you just can’t get some stuff to—I’m not saying that we don’t try to do that. We put a lot of equipment over there for them to use, whether it be dumbbells or whether it be free weights or whether it be cardiovascular machines and things like that, and for us, we have some people on the ground, but it’s more on the ships that we like to make sure they’re up and running, too. You have deployed ships going out all the time, and we want to make sure those gyms are fully equipped and funded as far as getting parts out to them when they need to repair the equipment and things like that.

So I don’t think it’s hurt us at all with the war going on, like we’ve been affected as far as they’ve taken something away from us. I think it’s helped us to make sure we are helping the sailor. That’s what it has come down to. I wouldn’t say there’s been an “Oh my gosh, we’ve put more money into this.” We’ve got some money to help the sailor to make sure that when they’re over there that they have stuff to do in their free time. There’s not a lot of places they can go always being in a hostile environment like that, so when they have places to work out and things to do, it really helps their morale and helps the sailor feel better about themselves. It gives them that little bit of time away from what’s actually going on there, and definitely for us, to get them that equipment, that’s a big thing.

Q: You do a number of group exercise programs and other big-scale events on ships, correct?

A: Yes, it just depends on what’s going on. Like we’ve had Billy Blanks go out and do different classes for us when he’s come and helped us out, so we’ve developed some huge classes onboard some of the aircraft carriers on the flight deck. I think they had 200 or 300 people on top of one of the carriers working out at one time, which is a pretty cool event to see. But I mean it’s just having the people out there, the professionals out there, to organize those types of events. It’s nice that we are allowed to hire and find people out there in the field that are willing to go out on a ship for full deployment and work for the military. It’s kind of nice going outside of that environment of the health club and out into more of an industrialized [environment] because basically an aircraft carrier or a small ship is a floating factory. So that’s kind of a unique thing when they go out there and do that, and you live a little bit of a different lifestyle as far as being away from your family for a given amount of time, but it’s very rewarding, too, when you can touch that many people.

Q: How many fitness professionals are employed within Navy Fitness right now?

A: Well, when we’re talking about just employed people in our housing and gyms and stuff like that, we’re talking all positions so about 3,000 people maybe [Navy Fitness] wide. But now our certified professionals, we only have a few, not as many as [3,000] because not everybody is 100 percent certified because for a lot of the positions in our gym you don’t have to be. If you’re a person who works on equipment, not necessarily do you have to be certified in fitness, you’ll be certified in fixing the equipment, so not everybody’s that. We’d love to get more certified people because that gives us our credibility. And that’s difficult because in the fitness market there are a lot of options. If you want to be a personal trainer, you can work either in town or work in the military or different things like that. So it’s really the competition to get good people that is very difficult. And I’m sure that’s what a lot of health clubs deal with is finding good people on a regular basis and keeping them there and that they don’t move on to their own business or they find a better opportunity. So, about 3,000 [Navy Fitness employees]. Is it an adequate number? Well, no. We always need more certified professionals who are willing to come in and work with the military. And that’s the big thing, just getting those certified people because that gives us our credibility, and that’s really what helps us out.

Q: What qualifications are you looking for and how do you go about finding those quality people?

A: We can do it two ways. We can have the person who goes to college and gets a degree and gets a nationally recognized certification—whether it be NSCA [National Sports & Conditioning Association], ACSM [American College of Sports Medicine], ACE [American Council on Exercise] or any one of the kind of bigger ones that are nationally recognized. We do accept other ones. Those individuals usually apply for our fitness director jobs or our fitness coordinator jobs. Those are our top-tier kind of people. We also have what are called fitness specialists and fitness assistants who are more of our personal trainers and lower-level entry positions. These are people who might not have the four-year degree, but they have the fitness certification or they have the training somewhere and have the experience to back it up. You know, they’ve been in fitness for 20 years, and they have experience, and they’ve proven that. So in those positions, people can come in and work towards a degree, too. Say they want to come in and work towards a degree, and then they can move up in positions, too. We like to move people up that have been in the system, too. So if someone comes in as a fitness assistant, which is kind of a bottom tier of our fitness strata, that person can work their way up through training and stuff that we do for them, and we also try to do individual development plans with them when they get hired with us, so on a yearly basis, they are required to take so much training and things like that to improve their levels, whether it be attend conferences, attend clinics or just sending them to work on the computer a little bit more to develop different spreadsheets and stuff like that for fitness training. So that’s kind of our strata as far as coming in.

And we have other positions. We have custodial workers, we have our field maintenance people who take care of our ball fields and things like that, and we have our facilities coordinator who takes care of our buildings. And then we also have part-time staff, too. So we are always looking for the person who has some type of certification from a respectable organization and go on from there because that’s really where the credibility comes in. With so many certifications out there now, you really have to look at some of them and [make sure] it wasn’t just a one-day or an online thing that you sent your money in and got a certification. We really want to have the decent ones there.

Q: What is required of Navy Fitness professionals in their jobs both stationed abroad and at home?

A: When you walk into our facilities, you probably wouldn’t notice anything different than if you were to walk into a Bally or a 24 Hour Fitness or something like that. It looks the same. It has a front check-in counter, we have locker rooms, we have people passing out towels in the front, we have people checking in by scanning their cards or keeping track of who’s coming into the gym, and you have your full-fledged regular fitness center on a base and everything like that. Now are some better than others? Sure, just like out in the private sector, some are better than others, some are newer, some are older.

As far as our professionals, and the biggest thing is that, in the mornings, a lot of the commands PT [physical train], and a lot of times, we assist with those command PTs, and our fitness professionals may be coming in anywhere from 4 a.m. doing PT to 8 a.m. and somewhere in there they are PTing a big command. So they would be coming in and doing a full-scale large group exercise in an exercise room or outside. I’ve seen people do classes on beaches. I’ve seen people do classes on big ball fields where they get up on a stage, and they actually do a class for 100 to 150 people, depending on how big the command is. So it varies there, but that is an integral part sometimes of the mornings of our fitness staff that are out there actually running our PT programs for our sailors.

Then throughout the rest of the day and a lot of times in the mornings, you’ll see a lot of our retirees come into our gyms, and that’s when you have people who are working with personal trainers. Then, in the noontime rush between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., you have a few groups come in, and they do group PT again, or you have individuals come in for personal training and things like that. There are administrative duties throughout the whole day where [fitness professionals] are going out and making sure all the machines are working and things like that. Then in the late afternoon, we get another big rush between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. where the sailors are getting off work and are coming in. There are not as many command PTs at that time; that’s usually where a lot of our intramural programs kick in, so our sports coordinators are a little more active during that time as far as developing that. Sometimes around noontime, they have intramural noontime hours, and sometimes our sports coordinators will do things like over 35-year-old basketball leagues or intramural basketball in general or flag football or whatever season it is for the sports. And then it’s the same thing for the night.

So PT is more active in the morning, so more of our group fitness is done more in the morning, and as it gets later in the day, we have more individual personal training, where our sports people kick in more towards noontime and the late afternoon.

Now, when you are out to sea with a ship, you could be at a 24-hour day operation because the ship is alive 24 hours a day—it doesn’t shut down. It’s not like you go to work at 9 a.m. and get off at 5 p.m., and the ship is kind of quiet after that. No, it’s pretty much an active ship at all times, and it never stops. So you could be getting up at 5 a.m., doing a PT group, and then going around and checking all your machines around the ship and making sure they’re all up and running and things like that on a daily basis. You could be developing programs, or doing group exercise programs anytime during the day. You could run some at noon, you could run some in the afternoon and some in the early evenings, and you’d be teaching class, so you’d be having a how-to-lift properly type of class at 8 p.m. at night. You could also be doing a Power Point presentation or doing special events, too, as a fitness person.

Like when I was out to sea (Editor’s note: Meeker served as fitness director on USS Carl Vinson while at sea for a six-month deployment in 2001.), I held the Strongest Man Competition at 7 p.m. at night, and it went to like 10 p.m., so it was kind of a neat thing to do onboard. And on the sports side, we held a boxing smoker (Editor's note: a smoker is a boxing tournament), so you could be setting up that at 7 p.m. and then not be done with that until like 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. if you are having a bunch of fights that night.

So as far as the out-to-sea person, I would love to say that there is a set schedule, but there really isn’t. Some days you’ll get up in the morning and go do your job all day, and you’ll look outside the blast doors there—they are open at night—and you’ll be sitting there at night going, “Man, I never looked outside today,” because you are just so busy onboard the ship doing things for fitness. When you are on deployment, it’s kind of weird because you are not taking on an environment of having other outside entities of “I’ve gotta go to the store,” or “I’ve gotta go do this,” but when you are on the ship, that’s it. You seem like you thrust yourself into your job a little bit more because that’s the main emphasis, and you enjoy doing it. It really is so rewarding. You may not hear it on a daily basis, but the biggest thing I heard at the end of a cruise was that the people really thanked me for just having the equipment up and running. Because that’s probably the most important thing, if that equipment isn’t up and running, that means a sailor can’t work out. So if you have one, two, three, four or however many pieces down, well that’s how many sailors didn’t get to work out that day, and you think over a 24-hour period that could be 25, 100, who knows how many sailors who could have possibly worked out, but since that piece of equipment was down, no one got a workout. That is so critical to have that.

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