When it comes to being a fitness instructor, many people will ask me which certificate I should take and which training class I should apply for. In fact, if you are just a certificate, I can clearly tell you that any certificate is useless, whether it is a popular daughter or a national post. Because the threshold for obtaining these certificates is too low, it is nothing more than spending money to buy certificates. Everyone in the industry knows that they can't prove your professionalism. Even the certificate of NSCA-CSCS is meaningless to students, because more than 90% of students don't care what certificate you have and don't know what certificate has high gold content.

In fact, the better the gym or studio, the less it cares about the coach's certificate. On the contrary, those sales gyms will like coaches who can list a lot of certificates. They look awesome and attract students to pay for classes, but it is difficult to judge their actual level.

However, what I want to say is that the courses in various training courses are actually very useful. Moreover, attending the training class is a kind of supervision of your own study. You may find it difficult to teach yourself physiological anatomy, but after all, some teachers in the training class will extract the key points they think you should know, which is very helpful for you to get started. If you don't have any foundation and don't want to miss thousands of training fees, you can sign up for a class, but remember, don't take that certificate, learn knowledge!

In addition, it should be remembered that participating in training should not only accept knowledge, but also have one's own thinking and questioning spirit, because what the teacher said is not necessarily right, and fitness knowledge is updated every year. Maybe they are still using very old lesson plans or knowledge systems, so we must learn to distinguish, eliminate outdated or wrong content and absorb the essence.

I have participated in various trainings myself, and my experience is that the contents of the training courses are much shallower than those in the physiological anatomy textbooks. They may make a very thick textbook into two or three pages, but you can't learn the whole picture, just a superficial understanding. This is equivalent to taking a shortcut, but it is definitely not enough for your work. For example, learning English is equivalent to learning letters or words in a training class, which requires the coach to practice listening, speaking, reading and writing constantly. It's a pity that many fitness instructors just attend a training class now, and then go out to substitute classes, and will not continue to study in depth, and eventually become a qualified salesperson.

In addition, for some foreign authoritative certificates, I suggest you take the exam. Take NSCA-CSCS as an example, its training and examination are separated, its evaluation criteria are very objective, and its recognition in the industry is also very high. Although this certificate can't bring you many students, because students don't know this. But in the process of preparing for the exam, you will learn a lot, which will make you understand many previous doubts and form a new understanding of the professional field. Just like after I prepare for the TOEFL test, even if I don't study abroad, the review process will definitely improve my English. In addition, NSCA is very systematic. In the process of learning, applying the absorbed new knowledge to practice will also bring substantial help to students. Because these authoritative certificates abroad require the holder to continue his education, it will also stimulate you to keep learning and update your knowledge system.

In the final analysis, no matter what certificate, it is to learn new knowledge and improve personal technical level. According to my practical experience, even the certificate of NSCA-CSCS level is still easier than the first-class constructor I took in that year. NSCA-CPT is obviously much easier than the second-level constructor, but as a coach, we can't aim at certificates. I will introduce in detail how to prepare for CSCS in another article.