To become a personal trainer, most of all you need to be passionate about fitness and helping people. Before you can become a pro personal trainer though, you have to be certified by the relevant bodies. Each of the certifying bodies has some requirements that you must meet. One of them is that you must have a high school diploma or its equivalent. While that is the basic minimum, it would be best if you could have some kind of fitness training.
Here are the steps that you must follow to become a personal trainer:
Get your CPR or AED certification
We assume you already have your high school diploma. If not, you will need to get it, or its equivalent.
As for the CPR/AED training, the main reason for getting this certification is that the personal training certifying authority will require it. Another reason is that during training, anything can happen, especially with people who are not used to taking strenuous exercises.
Should there be an incident, or even a heart attack, you want to be sure that you can handle the emergency before emergency response comes. CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and AED stands for automated external defibrillator. The essence of these programs is that you will learn how to tell when a client is having a cardiac or breathing emergency.
Choosing your area of specialization
Personal fitness training is wide, with many tenets such that it would be hard to be a master of everything. As a result, you must choose an area of specialization that best fits your skills and preferences. This could be a person-to-person kind of personal training, or it could be group exercise or program planning. Once you have chosen your specialization, you should start training for it. You can always find all the information that you need from various fitness resources online and offline. Say for example, if you are able to help people with so many aspects of their life and not just fitness, you can choose to become a life coach. Here are some helpful tips on how to become a life coach.
Choose your certification and prep for it
Usually, you will choose one of the two most popular certifying bodies for personal trainers. These are the American National Council’s Certified Personal Trainer, or the National Academy of Sports Medicine. You can choose the one that you feel will be most suitable for you. You can then start preparing for their exam. This can be by taking lessons in a group, going for an exercise science undergraduate degree or taking different courses to equip you with knowledge to pass your exams.
Sit for the certification exam
This is where all the preparations that you have been taking have been leading. Thus, you need to register for the exam. You will need to make an application and pay the required fee. You will mostly take your exam online where you will be required to answer multiple-choice questions. They are many, usually from 120 to 150 in number. You had better prepare well because you cannot leave the computer when you get started on the questions.
Look for work
Once you have passed your personal trainer certification exam you can start looking for work. You can start by making applications online, or in your local gyms. Apply for work as an assistant to a qualified trainer so that you can learn the business firsthand. You may even choose to start working on your own, start building your own portfolio. Family and friends is a good place to start.
