Wow! That’s complicated…
I was gonna say, “study Men’s Health and frequent bodybuilding.com”…
[quote]RiVaL6 wrote:
a bunch of cert letters look good next to your name, but people dont give a rats ass about it.
its whether you can get the results that they want.
your education can come from any source… whether its a BA in exercise science, NASM NSCA KBC ACE etc etc it doesnt mean shit until you apply it and see what really works and what doesnt.
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I’ll agree with that. Alwyn Cosgrove and Dave Tate are probably two of the most accomplished men in fitness, training, and business but the only title they have is NSCA’s CSCS, but to be fair, that’s one of the hardest certifications to obtain. Still, it’s the only one they have. Most of the guys at my gym have the NASM certs, as well as ACE and then usually other insignificant, very easy certs.
the most successful coaches are the ones that view it as a career. A lot of kids come into the field while they are in school or trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives so they don’t take the job seriously and think if they just take a person through a hard workout then thats enough.24 hour fitness tends to have these kinds of trainers.
A crappy trainer is a rep counter who crosses their arms and looks bored, a good trainer can put someone through a workout and have them come out of it learning something and benefiting from it, a great trainer will get someone from point A to point B, and a pro can do the last point for all of his/her clients on a regular basis.
Being adaptable to differing clientelle is also huge. If you can rehab someone back from an injury, get someone to lose large amounts of fat, make a skinny dude jacked, and have your athletes continuosly break PR’s then youre a miracle worker. I guess the point is you never want to stop learning or you wont grow as a coach. hope that helps.
I am certified through NPTI (National Personal Training Institute). They offer different time frames for their certification. I took a 6 month course where we had book study and practical study. 4 hours a day and 4 days a week. I benefited from this program but have met others with the same certification that were crap for trainers.
I had an excellent instructor and while the knowledge base from the program was great to begin, it was not all encompassing. The most beneficial aspect of the program IMO was that we had to train people with observation from the instructors before we could graduate the program. I enjoyed the knowledge gained, I agree with BBB in that the trainer needs to continue their learning to do the best they can.
When I was a trainer my goal was to leave my client with the knowledge so that they could do it themselves after we were done. I dont need to be anyones fitness crutch.
the solution to the problem of poor performance on the part of personal trainers is not to increase regulations. the solution is for people to just not accept poor performance from their personal trainers. accreditation can be handled perfectly well with an ebay-like sort of decentralized process. if everyone refuses to have you train them… you get better or you’re not a personal trainer anymore. there is no reason to put everyone who would be a personal trainer through some super long ringer.