When it comes to continuing education for personal trainers, it can be rough to keep up with.
Depending on who holds your certification, it can take 20–45 hours of continuing education per renewal cycle. Suffice it to say, that can be tough to keep up with.
When you think about all of the things you have to do day-to-day in life already, keeping up with your official continuing education can be a real pain. Throw on top of that all of the restrictions on large gatherings from COVID-19, and everything just gets more complicated.
On top of that, you have to ask yourself about quality and how useful a course is really going to be for you and your career. Deciding what you need can be difficult, as well. Our own personal biases tend to influence education. Often, we opt to go with the things that make us comfortable, and not necessarily what will make us better trainers.
What to Look For When Choosing Online CEUs
Most people will simply look for a few seminars that are tightly focused on an area of personal interest. This is a great starting point when you’re making decisions about your continuing education. When we pursue our independent interests, we have a tendency to pay better attention, and generally get more out of it.
But a lot goes far beyond just what our personal interests are. Basically, by staying in your comfort zone, you could possibly be missing out on some life-changing content from another topic.
Whenever you start looking for continuing education, it’s advisable to take an honest look at your professional life and ask the question, “what are my weaknesses?”
Now, this can be a difficult question to ask sometimes, but it’s so important. When you know what your weaknesses are, you’re better-able to strengthen them.
This isn’t to say that you should ignore the subjects that you enjoy — far from it!
Finding Balance in Your CEU Choices
Balance is the key to nearly everything, and your continuing education is no different. As such, if you want to be strategic about where you spend your money on CEUs, it can be helpful to first evaluate yourself as a personal trainer.
Ask yourself how you’re doing. Do you have any trouble with developing programing? Do you want to know what the latest trends are in fitness? Are you happy with the number of clients you currently have? Do you want to know how to start something like podcasting?
The more scrutiny you give to your professional life, the better the decisions you can in terms of learning things that will really make a difference in your life as a certified personal trainer.
But you shouldn’t just focus on pushing your boundaries. Ideally, you should focus on balance.
Take some courses that are within your comfort zone, but try to dedicate at least 20% of your courses towards topics that will expand your horizons. This 20% goal isn’t very much — for the average trainer, it represents only 4 hours of material out of 20 — but it can make all the difference in the world if it expands your horizons.
Remember that, in the end, education simply tries to connect dots for students that would normally take them a while to figure out on their own. That’s what continuing education seeks to do for trainers just like you. And providers like FitFixNow do what we do specifically to help personal trainers grow and develop professionally, whether that means covering the latest fitness trends or giving you a primer on how to grow your fitness business.
No matter what your needs are, we’re here to help!