What Have You Been Up To?

"So, what have you been up to lately?"

I've been asked that question a lot lately, and usually I answer something along the lines of, "working and sleeping. That's about it," which typically gets me a response along the lines of "welcome to life, kid". However, if I really thought about it, I still get to do a lot of cool stuff.

Do I have as much free time as I did in high school or college? No way. 10 hour shifts take a good part of your day, and on the days that I do have a little bit more time I come home from work absolutely exhausted.

Yet, the ability to rest often comes through occupation. People do things to unwind. It's strange how after a 70 hour work week a doctor will choose to spend his weekend cycling 50 miles. That sounds like work. But, that's what we do.

As for myself, I am no exception to the rule. I spend all day on my feet training clients, demonstrating exercises, and occasionally picking somebody off of the floor (moving treadmills don't stop when you like sometimes), yet I still find time to get out there and do things.

To start with, I've still been doing a great deal of hiking, leading me to some pretty cool, little-known vantage points of my city.

 I found this cool goat and his little buddy while meandering about an absolutely stunning cemetery during one of my recent lunch breaks. He's there to clear out the brush.

A buddy went hunting for quail, and brought me a few to try. 

Tastes like chicken. Looks like frog. 

We recently got a double hammock, which I have thoroughly enjoyed. Retreat from society, find awesome spot, sleep in a tree. It's hard to find a better spot to take a nap. 

 I've been hiding some of my own geocaches lately. I'm pretty proud of this one. That's a camouflaged PVC pipe zip tied to a tree. You fill it up with a gallon of water, cover the hole at the bottom, and the cache floats to the top!

The floating cache!

This one just required solving a pretty tricky puzzle. A little plastic ammo case I got for $3 at Rural King, one of the greatest stores on the planet.

And, I've been working on my knife making skills. I cut the rough outline of the knife out of a piece of steel I got from Lowe's using an angle grinder. A bench grinder has allowed me to smooth down some of the edges, but it still needs a lot of work. Hopefully, it will look like the plastic version at the right when it's all said and done.  

I Thought That Was the Way to a Man's Heart?

One of the things that I really appreciate about where I work is how awesome my patients are. To prove just how awesome they are, every Christmas I get buried under a plethora of incredibly thoughtful and creative gifts.

Let's just say that my wife is fond of some gifts more than others.


Me: "Today was a good day for Christmas presents. I got all sorts of stuff!"

Yellowhed: "What'd you get?"

Me: "Well, here's a rum cake."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "Here's an orange with those smell-goody things stuck all in it."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "Here's a book on blacksmithing someone gave me. I'm pretty excited about it."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "And here's a giftcard to Olive Garden."

Yellowhed: [while fist pumping] "SUHHWEEET!"

On the Tip of My Tongue

80 something year old woman: "And that's why I left Chicago."

Me: "Why did...crud, I just forgot what I was gonna say."

80 something year old woman: "Welcome to the club, kid."

Geocaching Adventures

As I mentioned earlier, now that the underbrush and ticks have died off, I've been able to do a heinie-load of geocaching lately. 

Here's a few of the places it's taken me the past few weeks.

I found this little orange bat stuck to a tree in broad daylight. Initially, I thought he was the cache because he was right at ground zero, and I couldn't see his head. So, I poked him with a stick just to make sure. He didn't appreciate it very much. He flew a few feet away and chirped at me for the next 20 minutes. 

I'm not a huge fan of tupperware caches, as they tend to be trashed. 

This one more than made up for it though. It was hidden in the local library, and you could only find it by finding a tiny little magnetic pill container that told you the call number of the book that you were looking for. 

Fake rocks are always cool. 

I ended up pretty deep into bear country attempting to find this one, and didn't come to that realization until I was already deep into the woods. "Hey. This is a bad idea!" Next time I'm making sure that I have more than just a little pocket knife and a dead stick to defend myself. 

This one was absolutely fantastic. It took me to a magnificent view of a field on top of a mountain on a trail I didn't even know existed.

The girls really enjoyed finding this one hidden behind a reflector. They had to use a pair of pliers to get it out, it was so deep into the post. 

The girls really enjoyed having the local donkey follow them around the cemetery as we searched for clues as well. He was separated by a fence, but he followed them everywhere. 

"Feed me."

Winter Hiking

Writing is a funny thing.

It's something that I absolutely love, something that I find cathartic, yet it's hard to sit down and write what you WANT after you've been drained throughout the day. You can't just sit down and let the pen flow after you've been dealing with emails and presentations all day - at least I can't.

As a result, I've not been able to muster the energy to add an extra blog post for every exciting thing that's happened recently. I get to it when I do.

What I DID do lately though is go camping. And considering the fact that it's winter time here, I think that's a pretty big accomplishment.

I was feeling stressed out from work after a rough week, and asked Yellowhed if we could take a mini weekend vacation somewhere. I was thinking something like spending a few nights in one of her favorite cities, watching some movies, and eating at some nice restaurants.

She recommended camping.

I was stunned.

Of course I wanted to go camping. I always do. But to here those words come out of City Girl's mouth - the girl who once attempted to chase a baby bear through the woods because she wanted to hold it - blew me away. And so, we went.

*PLOP* Our little tent!

It's been a while since I've spent the night outside, and so I guess I'm a little rusty. I completely forgot that there's a difference between winter and summer tents. A summer tent tends to have mosquito netting in the top so it doesn't get so stuffy during the mid-July heat. However, it also allows wind to rip through your little lean-to like a Taco Bell fart through swimming trunks. 

Guess which one we had. 

It was absolutely frigid. 

I knew that it was going to be cold on top of the mountain. It always is there for some reason. Even in the middle of summer, you can get hypothermia up there. Back in high school a friend and I went up there and he decided to bring nothing but a sheet to sleep in at night. A sheet. He no longer does that. 

As a result, I brought every blanket with us that we had in the house (literally), as well as every packet of HotHands that I'd been hoarding over the years. As soon as I got out of the car to register I knew it was going to be a loooong night. It was easily 20 degrees below the already low temperature back at home. We ended up going to bed at around 6pm simply because it was too cold to not be inside of a sleeping bag anymore. 

I spent most of the night curled into a little ball in the bottom of my sleeping bag wondering how I could be so cold with so many blankets. Eventually, I gained the courage to peep my head out to see how Yellowhed was doing. 

There she was, sound asleep, with every blanket on her wrapped up like a little cocoon. I further mustered the courage to wake her up, and when she saw how cold I was she offered to share.

She's so nice. 

It was at this point that I decided to break out the HotHands packets. I'd been awake for well over 3 hours in the middle of the night trying to stay warm, and by golly I was gonna fall asleep. 

I ripped open a couple of the packets, lining the inside of my sleeping bag with them, and finally got some rest. 

We woke up with the mutual understanding that we were going to be much better prepared next time. 

What's Been Happening

I've had a bit more free time now that grad school is over, and it's allowed me to do a whole lot of the things that I've had to put off for a while. 

I was able to spend a good bit more time in the garden, and though everything is pretty much dead now, I did manage to pick these pretty nifty colored carrots.

I picked some chestnuts out of my Papa's garden in an attempt to make a type of peanut butter out of them. It took HOURS. The end result was an oatmeal-y paste that tasted like baby food. 

Yellowhed wanted to pick apples again, so we checked out one of our favorite orchards. Unfortunately, the rest of the state had the same idea, because there was easily 500 people there that evening (literally). It took us 45 minutes just to battle traffic up the driveway.

Found my Dad a Halloween costume. 

It didn't turn out as pretty as I was hoping, but I finally finished the river rock travel chess board that I've been working on. I got the rocks from a local stream, used a dremel to etch out the shapes I wanted, filled the shapes with acrylic paint, and then glossed over the stones to give them a wet look. 

Now my little sister and I can play at the beach without the pieces blowing all over the place again. 

Yellowhed had to work Halloween, so I spent the day hiking one of the most beautiful peaks I know. 

We made pumpkins. 

Annnnd, with the fall weather killing off all the underbrush and ticks, I've started going out geocaching again. Here's the one I found yesterday. 

Is A Degree In Exercise Science Worth It?

After going through the post-graduation job safari myself, counseling a number of students currently going through the job safari, and really getting a good look at what's out there, you eventually come to the question:

Was a degree in exercise science really worth it?

Not all college majors are created equal. TIME and Think Advisor have already proved that, and you can readily see the statistics on a number of other websites.

Like it or not, there are some majors that simply aren't useful. Philosophy and gender studies immediately spring to mind. You can't find a job with them. So automatically, we know that some college majors are duds.

However, some show more promise, such as is the case with exercise science. I was told again and again all through my undergrad just how expansive our field was going to grow, and how we would never have to worry about job security.

Maybe that's the case, and maybe it isn't (I'd argue more of the "isn't" line), but what my professors failed to mention was the pitiful pay you are likely to earn with a degree in exercise science.

The average student loan rate is currently around $30,000 after graduation, as you can see here. The average starting salary for somebody with a degree in exercise science is approximately $36,000, according to that Think Advisor link above.

How long do you think it's going to take you to pay off that $30,000 only making $36,000/year?

The answer? Forever.

What jobs do you qualify for with a degree in exercise science though?

Really, the only jobs are as a personal trainer, or as an exercise physiologist.

Unfortunately, you don't need a college degree to become a personal trainer. In fact, you really don't need anything to jump into personal training. You can get a job training at just about any gym out there after spending $100 on a certification test. Voila. You're a personal trainer, making an average of $37,000/year, according to Glassdoor.

The $100 test guy isn't going to know anywhere near as much as you are going to, but he's also not going to be $30,000 in the hole, in addition to the cost of not working full-time for 4 years while you were at college. To start off as a personal trainer, all you really need is a working knowledge of the gym, charisma, and to be in shape. Obviously that's a broad generalization, but seriously. I see a lot of trainers that know squat, yet they're good marketers of themselves. As a result, they sell.

So to work personal training as a career, I honestly can't say that a degree in exercise science is your best bet.

What about exercise physiology?

Depending on where you work, you may or may not need a master's in exercise science to land a job here. Unfortunately, those with a master's rarely make anything more than one with a bachelor's in exercise science. So a master's isn't worth it in my book.

What you are going to need no matter what, is some form of certification with diseased populations. Most 4-year programs have these put into their degree completion plans already. The ACSM CEP test is the best known.

A job as an exercise physiologist is certainly a lot more stable than as a personal trainer. With exercise physiology, you typically work for a hospital, and have set hours. Come in at 7am, leave at 6pm. Personal training is really just up to you. How many clients can you get?

Exercise physiology is certainly a lot more in-depth as well. You'll be working with cancer patients, guys who just finished having their chest sawed open, people with strange diseases, and incredibly brittle old ladies. You have to know what you can do, and what you can't. You have to know how that medication is going to affect Mrs. Jones' blood pressure. You have to know which exercises will flare up Bob's sciatica. It's on you. You mess up, and somebody can die, or get seriously hurt.

It's a lot more responsibility, As a result, you'll probably get benefits, and a median pay of $50,000 according to Glassdoor.

Now I'm not sure where Glassdoor gets their numbers from, but I can tell you that I've yet to meet an exercise physiologist (and I know a lot of them), who's making $50,000/year. Think more like $30,000. That $50,000 number may come from a big city like New York or San Diego where everybody makes more anyway (and everything costs more too).

I can remember my very last semester at college, when one of my professor's finally said something about our job opportunities. "Yeah, ya'll are probably going to have to go to grad school. You can't really support a family off of exercise physiology."

Shoot. That would have been nice to know.

If you absolutely have your heart set on exercise physiology though, you're going to need a degree in it.

As ya'll know, I am an exercise physiologist. I was a personal trainer. I absolutely love both of them. There is nothing like helping somebody to overcome a painful shoulder that nobody else could fix. To help a morbidly obese man lose 200 pounds. To help somebody with COPD not only now be able to walk across the room, but to get off of oxygen, and be able to do HIIT training. Exercise physiology rocks, and I love it.

However, I keep coming across students who are absolutely lost after they graduate. Ultimately, is it up to them to research their college major before taking classes? Absolutely. Is it wrong for exercise science professors to paint a pie-in-the-sky picture of exercise physiology for students though? Absolutely. Not a single one of my professors has ever worked as an exercise physiologist, and only one of them was a personal trainer. They have no clue. They're straight academics.

Am I complaining? No. If I knew what I knew now, would I still choose exercise physiology as a career? Yes. This is a passion of mine. I feel like I belong here. Paramedics make peanuts. They average $30,000/year, and yet there are still plenty of people out there who make that their full time job. Why? Because they love it.

So that's what it all boils down to with exercise science, I believe. Do you want to be a personal trainer? Skip college. You don't need it. Do you want to be an exercise physiologist, and have a full understanding of what that requires? Then do it. Are you planning on going to grad school afterwards in public health, physical therapy, biomechanics, MBA, med school, or something like that? Then by all means, take the exercise classes. You'll gain a different perspective from a lot of others out there, and be set financially.

However, if you think for a minute that you're going to make a large amount of money as an exercise physiologist, think again.

Just something to think about for all you upcoming potential exercise science students.

(And for the record, I went on to get my MPH. I absolutely love exercise science, and hopefully will be able to come back to it/somehow stay attached to it, but I want to be able to financially support my family, and I don't see that happening otherwise.)

Check out Eric Cressey's two awesome posts on the subject HERE and HERE. They may get you to thinking as well.