Getting qualified as a personal trainer

After much soul searching (no, not really), I’ve decided to take the plunge and get qualified as a personal trainer.

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Why would you do that?

Well, I work at the sharp end of corporate finance at the moment.  I help people raise debt and equity funding and I help them buy and sell businesses.   For some it would be a dream job and don’t get me wrong, I enjoy doing it.  I just don’t see myself doing it ten years from now.

Late night completions are not uncommon and it’s routine for stressful problems come crawling out of the woodwork like lice during due diligence.  It’s never boring (which is why I got into it in the first place) but it can be pretty hard going.

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OK, what are you expecting to get out of the qualification?

I am hoping to get:

1. a qualification that will enable me to work formally with people doing what I already enjoy helping people do;
2. a framework of understanding that will help me consolidate what I know about training and broaden my knowledge base; and
3. an idea of where my knowledge gaps are.

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Point #1: A qualification

I am under no illusions that a personal training qualification is a pass into an industry and not an education.  The education comes with extensive reading, conferring with others and experimenting within the parameters that are available.  I’m actually really excited to be thinking about the whole new arena of learning opportunities that the qualification will open up to me.

Hopefully, Jake will let me learn what I need to…

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Point #2: A framework

When I was exploring what training provider to use, I emailed my friend Rob Newman for his recommendations and he volunteered that the main benefit of the course was the formalisation of knowledge he mostly already had.

I think that is the main thing that I’m looking for: a framework to hang the knowledge that I already know and to hang knowledge that I want to develop in the future.

I want to understand the broader spectrum of training requirements.  What does that mean? Well, from training myself and Anna (and one or two other willing guinea pigs), I feel that I’ve developed some quite detailed understanding of certain specific areas.  For example, I feel that I have experience of how to:

• ascertain whether someone is very fast-twitch dominant (me) or very slow-twitch dominant (Anna) and programme accordingly in order to develop strength
• take a female trainee from doing no pull ups to being able to do half a dozen
• work up to a one-arm chin without getting tendonosis (or tendonitis, for that matter)
• work on back squat form to get from way, way above parallel down to parallel
• identify common indications of glute weakness and help develop strength there

But there are many things that I do not know how to do.  I have read about many of them but that doesn’t mean I fully understand them because I have never tried them.  For example, I don’t really know how to:

• put together programmes to support specific sports, such as time trial cycling (very popular in my area), rowing, rugby or football
• take the powerlifts above national qualifying levels
• train an obese beginner
• correct for muscular imbalances that I haven’t experienced
• assess someone more generally for weaknesses and immobility

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Point #3: Knowledge gaps

Finally, I know that there are things that I don’t know that I don’t know.  I would like to make those things fewer.  I want to increase the things that I do know and the things that I know that I don’t know.  Confused?  Here’s Donald Rumsfeld to clarify it for you…:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

I love that quote.  I think Mr Rumsfeld is one of the great existential philosophers of our age.  Here he is in action:

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Here’s to making some of my unknown unknowns into known unknowns.