1. Turn up to your face-to-face workshops because this is where your tutor will teach you a lot of the practical elements of personal training. Because they are personal trainers themselves, they will be able to give you lots of advice based on their own experience of what it’s actually like working in the industry.
2. Your tutor will teach you about the practical exercises, how to teach them and how to plan a session, but we’ve also included an Exercise Library in the STUDY RESOURCES where you can watch a PT on video, training a client doing dozens of different exercises.
3. In between your workshops you need to start practising what you’re learning. You can do this by going to the gym with a colleague on the course so that you can practise on each other or taking a friend who’s willing for you to practice on them.
4. Read the Essential Lectures in the STUDY RESOURCES on the various topics that you will need to know about when you fill in your assessment booklets (more about these below!)
5. Underneath the Essential Lectures, there is a section called Supplementary Lectures where you will find videoed lectures by guest lecturers who are industry experts. These are definitely worth a watch.
6. DOING YOUR OWN RESEARCH which is a vital part of learning. In the STUDY RESOURCES, you will find a section called Student Library where we have included a number of free downloadable text-books. And of course, the internet is an invaluable source of information.
7. AND FINALLY – Your Assessment Booklets. These you will find in a section in the STUDY RESOURCES. You should download them and save them to your computer because you need to be filling them in as you go through the course. Please do NOT print them out – they are PDF documents which allow you to type your answers in the boxes. When you fill in the answers, DON’T just copy and paste things that you have read. You MUST PUT INFORMATION IN YOUR OWN WORDS. That way your examiner will know that you have understood what you have written.
Also, don’t forget to save the document as you go along. We all know someone whose computer dies after three hours of work – and they’ve lost the lot!!
DON’T BE TEMPTED TO LEAVE FILLING IN THE ASSESSMENT BOOKETS TILL THE LAST MINUTE. Far better to set aside definite times during the week when you fill them in bit by bit. If you don’t do this, you may find that it all becomes too overwhelming, and you just give up.
