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PEOPLE PROFILE Doug Werner
Werner, a founder of US-based Healthtrax, has worked in the fi tness industry for 35 years. Earlier this year he published a book, Abbie Gets Fit, which aims to tackle the problem of childhood obesity
How did your career in the health and fitness industry begin? I began my fitness career in 1977 as a part-time trainer in one of the very first Nautilus gyms in Boston, US.
How did your career progress? A very good friend from my high school years converted a tennis club into a large racquetball club in Enfield, CT. He decided to include a Nautilus centre and visited me at my Nautilus gym in Boston. That racquetball and Nautilus centre in Enfield became the very first Healthtrax Fitness Center – to this day, Healthtrax owns that site. In the last 32 years, I’ve left and rejoined the company on four occasions. During these ‘sabbaticals’, I’ve been a
vice president of operations for Town Sports International, spent 10 years with Nautilus, and was sales director with Life Fitness. Some of your UK readers may remember me as the director of business development for Star Trac UK, based out of London in the late 90s.
How was the idea of writing a book about kids’ fitness born? When my daughter Abbie was nine years old, she failed a fitness exam at school. As a result, we set out on a six-month quest to improve her fitness levels and prepare for the next exam. Abbie’s fitness transformation was remarkable and the bond we forged as a result has changed our relationship forever. The idea for the book came nearly four
years after Abbie’s journey to ‘get fit’. At the time of the story, nine-year-old Abbie was so excited about her own success story that she became sincerely determined to help other children. Originally, this was to be a ‘how to’ book
for parents, but I decided that a textbook on youth fitness was the last thing anyone needed. Instead, it’s a fun and endearing success story that children can relate and aspire to, and parents can learn from.
august 2012 © cybertrek 2012
Who is the book targeted at? I think this book is a must-read for all parents of young children who are inactive and/or overweight. The main point is, however, that
parents need to be prepared to recognise the signs of an unfit child and provide leadership and solution. A child’s appreciation for the need to be fit should begin in the home – their fitness needs should not be left up to schools, doctors or the community at large.
What do you hope to achieve with the book? We hope to help educate parents, not only on the need to get involved in their child’s fitness, but also to appreciate the tremendous and various benefits of physical fitness for both parent and child. We also hope the fitness industry will use this story as validation of the benefits of low-intensity exercise for specialised markets, and as inspiration to do more for those audiences.
What’s the number one weakness in the fitness industry? Well, that’s a loaded question – it’s hard not to sound ungrateful or high-handed when I owe so much to this wonderful industry! I guess, due to the very competitive
nature of the fitness industry, we as businesses tend to preach mostly to the converted. We’re also our own worst enemy when it
comes to creating counter-productive messages and misperceptions about the means and ways of ‘fitness’. For example, we still frequently use young bathing suit models and hard body athletes as the marketing images for fitness success.
What’s your favourite life motto or quote? “You can have anything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want” – Zig Ziglar.
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