When you have a passion for health and fitness, there’s a good chance you’re the go-to person your social network reaches out to for advice and information about cardio workouts, strength training, healthy eating, injury prevention, and race-prep strategies. Sound familiar?
For a lot of fitness-minded people that’s the route to becoming a personal trainer. You find yourself fielding a lot of questions, helping people train smarter, and diving into the research to keep learning more. Reach this point in your journey, and becoming a certified personal trainer is a natural next step.
But you’ll need to pass your personal trainer certification exam first. And instead of the old-school sink-or-swim style of taking tests in school, American Fitness Professionals & Associates gives you all the tools you need to pass your exam.
Work your way through the training materials and follow these tips for passing your personal trainer certification exam, and you’ll be able to turn your passion for health and fitness into profits. Here’s what to do to get ready for the exam:
Learn How to Become a Certified Personal Trainer Online in Less Than 6 Months
1. Visualize passing the exam
If you’re thinking about skipping over this, don’t. It might seem like a silly intellectual exercise, but it works. Take a few minutes to simply visualize your exam day. You wake up well rested. You’re happy, confident, and knowledgeable after studying and learning all the materials. You feel relaxed, even when it’s time to take the test. Imaging yourself recalling all the information you’ve studied with ease as you move through the question set. And visualize the feeling of satisfaction of passing the personal trainer certification exam.
It’s an exercise that one of the legends in the fitness industry has used for decades to win bodybuilding competitions, dominate the silver screen with a stunning physique, and inspire others to make smart lifestyle decisions about fitness and nutrition.
“The mind is the limit,” says Arnold Schwarzenegger. “As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.”
2. Create a study plan that fits your life
When you receive the study materials for the personal trainer exam, you’ll realize there’s lot of information to cover. If you’ve already been immersed in health and fitness, you’ll be one step closer to passing the exam. But you’ll still need to study. Work out a study schedule that fits your life, work, family, and other commitments.
Maybe you’ve got the bandwidth to study two hours a day. Maybe your best study time is a couple of hours on the weekend. Or maybe your schedule is totally open and you can dedicate a bigger chunk of time to study every day. Figure out a study plan that fits your life, and stick to it. It’s an investment in yourself, and those little chunks of study time will help you pass the personal trainer exam.
3. Don’t try to memorize everything
The materials you receive to study for the exam make up a comprehensive resource library of everything you need to know about the business of being a personal trainer, anatomy and physiology, training strategies, client interactions, nutrition guidelines, and much more. You should read and study everything. But don’t obsess over memorizing every detail.
Obviously there are key principles and facts you need to understand to pass the personal trainer certification exam. But you’ll also have these materials to refer back to when you do start training clients to create safe and effective training plans. Instead of just memorizing the facts, study the material and think about how it applies to training people.
4. Study, practice, repeat
You have six months to study for the personal trainer certification exam from the time of enrollment. That’s about 180 days, 4,320 hours, and 259,200 minutes. And if you make “study, practice, repeat” your mantra, and take the full six months to get ready, you’ll be able to cover a lot of material in that amount of time. Take the practice quizzes. Read and study the course textbooks. Use the DVD set. Make your own flashcards you can use to study on the go. And take advantage of the unlimited student support to get help, answer questions, and prep for the exam. Study, practice, repeat…study, practice repeat.
5. Believe in yourself
Meet with personal training clients long enough, and you’ll start to realize that a lot of people know what they should do to lose weight, build muscle, or improve their health, but they’re just not doing it. Why? A lot of times, it’s because fear or self-doubt gets in the way.
As a trainer, you can literally transform people’s lives by giving them a boost of confidence and pointing the way to help them achieve their goals. To be a motivating force for others, you also need to have confidence. As part of your journey to pass the personal trainer certification exam, you need to believe in yourself.
Every time you sit down to study, think about taking the exam, field a question from a friend about health and fitness, or see something that reminds you of your goal to become a personal trainer, train your brain to repeat this:
“I want to inspire people. I want someone to look at me and say, “Because of you, I didn’t give up.”
Put in the work, study, train your brain to think like you’re already a pro, believe in yourself, and you’ll be ready to pass the exam. You got this.
