HEALTH MAGAZINE IS IN FINE SHAPE

By SANDRA SALMANS
Published: December 14, 1983

Nobody shirks at American Health magazine.

The publisher, who admits to being slightly out of shape, volunteered for a humiliating match with the top-ranked American squash player. The executive editor spent a month of leg lifts and aerobics at a Vermont body conditioning spa, trimming 16 pounds from her chubby frame. The chief of research did some first-person research in a 10-kilometer race, and shaved two minutes off her best time.

It is all good copy for American Health, the self-proclaimed magazine about ''fitness of body and mind.'' American Health will celebrate its second birthday next March and, while the staff may number more enthusiasts than natural athletes, there is nothing unfit about their product.

In a period when other more lavishly financed magazines - Time's TV-Cable Week, Reader's Digest's Families - have closed down, American Health is one of the sturdiest newcomers to the difficult and competitive world of magazine publishing. Indeed, it is one of the rare survivors; 9 out of 10 new magazines fail within 18 months, according to the Magazine Publishers Association. For a specialty magazine, American Health is growing nicely. At the end of September, it sold 465,000 copies - of which less than one-sixth were newsstand sales, at $2 apiece. The demographics are good; the average reader's age is 36 and, while 70 percent are female, the ratio is expected to become less lopsided in the future. Advertising revenues for the first nine months totaled $1.5 million, or 202 pages.

What's more, according to Owen Lipstein, the 32-year-old publisher and defeated squash player, the figures are better than they look. Half of the magazine's first-year subscribers renewed, an exceptionally high ratio. For the March-April 1984 issue, Mr. Lipstein said, the guaranteed circulation will be 650,000. It will go monthly in May, he said, and be solidly in the black in 1985.

'A Very Hot Book'

''The circulation is growing so fast that it's delivered better than the numbers,'' said Peter Spengler, vice president of advertising services at the Bristol-Myers Company, which this year bought 18 pages of ads. American Health ''is a very hot book,'' he said.

According to Mr. Spengler, American Health occupies a niche somewhere between Prevention, the 33- year-old Rodale Press monthly, and Self, the four-year-old Conde Nast magazine that industry wits have dubbed ''Vogue with sneakers.'' And with rates well below those mass-circulation magazines, it has attracted such blue-chip advertisers as Procter & Gamble, Revlon, General Foods and Johnson & Johnson, in addition to Bristol-Myers.

Editorially, American Health is essentially a news magazine whose focus is the mind and body, according to its editor, T George Harris. Mr. Harris, 59, the founding editor of Psychology Today, said that it was almost accidental that much of the information - about nutrition, hunger, stress - has proved to be of service to readers.

''We've been able to take the exotic frontier material in medicine and behavior, and find it applies to what people do,'' he said in an interview last week.

Features for Sensitive Soles

Hence, the magazine has boasted such features as ''The Whole Foot Catalogue,'' with massages and other treatment for sensitive soles; ''Ah, Oolong, So Long To Cavities,'' a report that tea prevents tooth decay, and ''Staying Fluid,'' about ways to avoid dehydration. There are departments devoted to life style, nutrition and teeth. And to back up its 16 editorial employees, American Health has a board of M.D.'s, Ph.D's and R.N.'s.

''We're an owner's manual for the body,'' Mr. Lipstein said. ''This is the magazine for the baby-boom generation,'' he added. ''It reflects where the baby-boom generation, after the politics of the 1960's and 1970's, has ended up putting its energies.''

It was in February 1981 that Mr. Lipstein - who, as publisher of Science '81, felt science books were ''too gee-whiz'' - first approached Mr. Harris - who, after his years at Psychology Today, felt that the area below the neck was being neglected - with what he calls ''a screamingly obvious idea.''

With Mr. Harris's editorial clout behind the venture, the rest fell into place with surprising ease. Venture capital for new magazines has been scarce, but Oppenheimer & Company, the investment bank, raised $5 million for American Health, and a second $5 million last summer. Publishers such as Time Inc. and Conde Nast Publications Inc. have pumped more than $10 million into their new magazines, but the sum was unusually large for entrepreneurs new to publishing, according to William Gorog, president of the Magazine Publishers Association.

To find readers, the American Health team culled the mailing lists of Psychology Today, Savvy, Runners World and other ''upscale, health-and-life style books,'' Mr. Lipstein said. They hired Bill Jayme, the acknowledged master of direct-mail solicitations, to draft its mailing: a letter offering ''New vim! New vigor! New vitality!'' in a shiny envelope with a photograph of juicy orange slices on one side, a laboratory on the other.

Gamble Paid Off

''We dropped eight million pieces of mail, nearly half our financing,'' Mr. Lipstein recalled. But the gamble paid off handsomely, and the magazine began in March 1982 with 300,000 subscribers.

The way Mr. Lipstein sees it, the magazine's continued growth is all but inevitable. ''There's a social and physical revolution,'' he said. ''The interest in health and fitness is not a fad.'' Although he declined to project circulations of one million or more, he said, ''My gut tells me it's a big magazine.''

The view is apparently shared. Mr. Lipstein said that he has turned down four bids for the magazine.

American Health, meanwhile, is trying to become bigger. It advertises on Hearst-ABC's Cable Health Network, with which for a time it had a barter arrangement - printing the service's program guide in return for free commercial time. It periodically surveys its readers by telephone, asking them what they liked, and what did not like, about an issue. As a result, nutrition has become the largest section of each issue, overtaking fitness and medical news.

And like other magazines, it constantly invites new subscribers with mailings and inserts. Its current bid for gift subscriptions, urging readers to make it ''a healthy New Year for your friends,'' features an unfamiliar Santa Claus - paunchless, and in running shoes.