As I mentioned in my last post I’m working towards my Personal Trainer’s Certification. I talked about how long of a process it is compared to how long I thought it would take and how hard it was going to be. What I want to touch on now is how much of a pain in the ass the Fitness Theory course was but how I realized that it’s all worth it in the end.

The Fitness Theory course is the pre-requisite course to all of the fitness certification courses and it’s the first course to complete in my becoming a fitness professional. Once I complete this course, I will be eligible to take the weight training (just took this), group training, yoga, or third age (seniors) courses and then move on to my Personal Trainer course, if I want to. Initially, I wasn’t aware of that this was only the FIRST step and I only found all of this out in the second week of my 8 week Fitness Theory course. Needless to say, when I found out this wasn’t going to give me my PT cert right away, I was a bit pissed, but instead of bailing on it and then doing the quick and easy CanFit Pro certification, I decided to go the long and painful way, through the NSFA, and do the 8 week Fitness Theory program, the Weight Training Certification and THEN the Personal Trainer Certification. I finished up the 8 week course last month and did the Weight Training course this past weekend.

It’s funny, throughout the Fitness Theory course, and up until last week, I thought the FT course was a huge pain in the ass and that it was a complete waste of my time. It was mainly my own fault because I didn’t research what the exact process was before jumping in and I let the excitement of what I was doing get the best of me and didn’t read the fine print, my mistake. But the main reason I thought it was a waste of time was because I didn’t realize that I still had to go and get two more certs after I was done this one to get to where I wanted to be. I thought that once I was done the Fitness Theory course, I was going to have my Personal Trainer’s cert and could jump right in to personal training. Instead, I came to find out I was only going to be a Fitness Instructor, which didn’t allow me to do in-depth, one on one personal training like I wanted to.

In retrospect, the course itself wasn’t that bad and our instructors were great, I just found that it went WAY more in depth than I was mentally prepared for and the information that they talked in depth about, was DRY!! And when I say dry, I mean BONE dry! I really enjoyed the Nutrition part of the course and the chapters on “Principles of Conditioning” and “Program Planning” as well “Exercise Injury Prevention and Risk Management” but I absolutely HATED the “Biomechanics of Motion” and “Force Production and Body Composition”. They SOUND interesting, but trust me, it’s boring and frustrating and all about memorizing, and not actually learning. I also think a large part of it was that I was bitter that I was wasn’t going to have my PT cert when I was done and so every week I was bitter when I had to go sit in a room for 3 hrs after working all day to do something I wasn’t 100% happy about.

I bitched every week before having to go to class about having to go to class and I’m not exactly sure what changed my mind about how I feel about the Fitness Theory Course, but now, at this point, I’m very glad I took it! It’s going to help me be a better trainer when I eventually get to that point. It taught me a lot about the body and different systems and what they do and when paired up with the Weight Training course, it all kind of came together for me.

Now that I think about it, I think it was being in the gym and using the terminology from the book in the gym setting that brought me around on the whole thing. I also realized if you’re going to do it, do it right. Don’t bull shit around and make it worth your while.

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