The Gold Standard in Professional Fitness
Reach for the gold standard…
Transcript
The first advice I ever received as an instructor came after leading the strength segment in my first cardio kickboxing class in 1998. My Tae Kwon Do master wanted to bring kickboxing to our school so he sent my lowly yellow belt self to a 4 hour training with another, far more experienced instructor, to get “certified”.
This instructor had agreed to mentor me, co-teaching a few classes until I felt comfortable. My first taste of group fitness was simply to lead a 15 minute strength segment. Simple, right? Pushups and crunches, maybe some leg lifts. Piece of cake. Wrong! I was so nervous I whispered the count to myself. Her feedback was simple, speak up and speak out.
I could barely breathe let alone breath and talk AND count! Wait AND look at people, AND notice what they’re doing...Seriously, how did people do this and make it look so easy?
I’m not gonna lie, I was freaking out a little bit about what I’d gotten myself into but I was confident that with a little more practice I could totally do this. Especially because she was going to help me for a few more classes. I had time. After all I loved martial arts, I was strong and I was confident I could break down the 4 basic punches, 3 kicks and a knee strike into a decent workout. I mean, come on, how hard could that be? Just because I had no idea how to put an 8 count series together let alone a 16 or 32 count that wasn’t gonna stop me. Not worried at all. I got this.
Then the next Saturday rolled around, 2nd class, and she ghosted. (that wasn’t a word back then but that’s what happened) Literally didn’t show up. No notice, no phone call, nothing.
There I was with 15 minutes of teaching experience, basically 1 ½ months of martial arts experience and no clue...standing in front of a class. I don’t think I even had a class planned although now I don’t remember. I probably blocked that part out.
I taught that class anyway. Very badly I’m sure. And because I had zero idea how to count 8, 16, and 32 and make it match the mortal combat soundtrack I timed out the combination intervals and prayed I didn’t forget my left and right mixed up. When we had to count, counted to 10. It was rough, but by god everyone could hear me!
I’m telling you this story because we all start somewhere. And while you might not have been thrown in the deep end with combat boots on like I was, there isn’t a certification out there that magically transforms a piece of paper into experience and wisdom before you step in front of your class. The only way to gain experience in your thing is to do your thing.
Unfortunately in the fitness industry that means there’s a pretty broad spectrum of quality instructors. Not just because the certifying agencies vary but also because we as instructors are so varied. Most of us don't come to this career straight out of college with a degree in Kinesiology and sports science. Nope, most group fitness just love to work out and help people and woohoo, now we can get paid to do it! You don’t have to go back to school to get a certification and for the most part it’s not terribly expensive and the entry cost is pretty low. (Although no one tells you how much CECs are going to be to maintain that certification ( but that’s a topic for another podcast.)
Being a group fitness instructor is a great gig for stay at home moms or side hustles because you control your schedule and it’s pretty flexible. (Although no one really tells you about how that can really cut into family time since you’ll be working when other people aren’t which is usually evenings, early mornings and weekends.Again another podcast)
Today I want to talk about professional standards in the fitness industry and specifically group fitness because while I believe things have gotten better I think we still have a long way to go to reach a balance between required industry knowledge and applying the wisdom of experience to support our clients and ourselves.
It didn’t take long teaching kickboxing for me to realize that I needed a stronger foundation in the science of health and fitness to be able to help my students in meaningful ways. So I started looking for a little stronger certification. But which to choose? I looked at ACE group fitness and NSCA personal trainer. I went back and forth about it and ultimately chose NSCA-CPT because I felt that it was a much more complete certification for the things that my students were asking. Like how many calories do I need to eat to lose 10 pounds. Plus at the time NSCA-CPT was the only accredited certification exam and I wanted something that meant something. (Although the general public doesn’t know anything about what all those letters stand for behind your name.)
I studied for 6 months and took the exam. Hardest test I ever took. And passed it by the skin of my teeth. But it was worth it because this was a gold standard certification. Very highly respected in the industry.
Getting that certification made me feel like I was qualified. I certainly had a bunch of knowledge stuffed into my head. What I didn’t have was any practical experience with that knowledge. And the only way to get that experience was to jump in.
In hindsight I think there’s a kind of glorious courage in not knowing what you don’t know. And I certainly had that in spades.
Over the course of the next six years I picked up a proper group fitness cert and cycling certification that added more letters but not really any new skills that I hadn’t figured out on my own. And by 2006 teaching 24 hours of fitness and martial arts classes per week.
I quickly realized that my gold standard certification wasn’t really doing me any good. It didn’t speak at all to the population of clients that I was working with. What good is understanding how to implement training macrocycles and micro cycles for elite basketball players or how to feed college football offensive linemen to get into ketosis when you’re working with the working mother of 3 who wants to lose 20 pounds and 2 dress sizes for her cousin's wedding? Or the woman down the street who just found out she’s got type 2 diabetes and her doctor told her to start exercising. Or the 45 year old divorcee who wants to run a marathon for the first time?
Now don’t misunderstand me here. NSCA is a gold standard organization. They know their stuff. The trainers who certify with them know their stuff. You’ll see those letters associated with college, professional and olympic elite level coaches. High school level too. And it’s great.
But it’s like going to see a brain surgeon for anxiety, or a rocket scientist to help you run a 5 k. I would argue that it’s missing the piece about how to work with real people.
The messy pieces of people who don’t live in a lab or a petri dish and aren’t 18-25 year old men. In fact every certification and specialty that I’ve collected over the past 25 years has got bits and pieces of truth without context. We as group fitness instructors and health conscious individuals, you and I are where the context lives.
It wasn’t until I started diving into trauma-informed instruction first through yoga and later David Berceli’s Trauma Release Exercise that I started to see the bigger picture. As I gained a deeper understanding of how the nervous system works in all humans I started to connect the dots.
Trainers and fitness instructors and health coaches we are passionate about helping people get healthy, get stronger or simply feel better. We are relentlessly energetic people, we love to encourage and motivate people and we love what we do. So it’s really hard to watch our clients struggle and often fail to get results despite taking all the latest greatest fitness recommendations right from the horse's mouth. And doing everything right
Now I can only speak for myself here but one of the things that I always had a hard time with was setting myself up as some kind of guru and creating clients who were completely dependent on me. My secret goal for them was always that they could someday leave the nest, cut the apron strings, go, fly, be free and work out on their own. At a certain point I always started feeling guilty taking their money and I couldn’t shake it. That’s a big reason why I never pushed personal training and eventually let that certification go in favor of Health coach and group fitness.
What I didn’t know early on and what many instructors miss in their certification education is an understanding of primal human nature. The nature of survival and how it affects our modern day health.
The nervous system is a general system. It’s not event specific. It reacts the same whether there’s a lion in the room or you just got fired. It’s not picky. It makes meaning and connects patterns based on everything you’ve been exposed to from the day we were born and turns that into habitual behavior that’s so deeply ingrained that most of us can’t even see where it comes from anymore.
That’s true for every client and student that walks through our door whether they acknowledge the stress and trauma they've experienced or not. It’s true for us as well. We are not different from them. Doesn’t really matter what we tell ourselves, or what they tell themselves, the story that the body tells us everyday doesn’t always match the one we tell ourselves everyday.
SO when we have a client that can’t lose weight, or can’t quit smoking or can’t change their eating pattern or always cancels sessions last minute, or skips stretching every class, or uses your class to punish themselves. Or when we can’t NOT teach, when we panic if we have to call off, if we use exercise as a way to NOT feel what we’re feeling...Yeah all of that is related to stress, tension and trauma in the body.
Everyone of our people comes to us for different reasons but it’s always to feel better in some way physically, mentally or emotionally. That can’t happen unless we can get back to a parasympathetic state, the calm side of your NS. And that’s true for any format, any class, any client, any instructor - no matter who you are, what your certification is.
We claim to want to help people, to encourage and motivate. We love being a cheerleader. But what if in our pursuit of all of that we are quietly failing our people? What if the way we are preparing ourselves as fitness professionals actually threatens our students at a primitive level? What if the way we teach, day in and day out, keeps our own bodies in a chronic state of activation that is quietly marching us toward injury, burnout and career collapse?
We live today in a world of systemic dysregulation, especially now. Everything is topsy turvey, social media is anything but social, people are afraid to say what they really think about pretty much anything even in person, The news is nothing but one horrific story after another. And we’re losing our ability to truly connect with people. None of this is helping our state of wellbeing. We’re all suffering.
As group fitness instructors, trainers and coaches, we are in a unique position to be able to make a really profound difference in our communities simply by sharing knowledge of how the nervous system works and shifting the way we teach with a simple trauma sensitive approach.
And you can do it without another certification. There are ways to overlay a simple framework to whatever your format is. It isn’t even a really big change. But our intention matters in everything we do and that starts the minute we step in front of a class.
Teaching in a trauma sensitive way levels up the professionalism in everything you teach while allowing you to be creative in your approach and stay within your scope of practice. It is the true gold standard of professionalism because not only does it restore the client to their rightful place as the driver in their wellness experience but teaching in trauma sensitive ways brings an energetic balance back to us as instructors that prevents burnout and sustains longer careers.
This podcast is dedicated to helping fit pros and the health conscious alike find better ways to navigate stress tension and trauma and so I’m sharing a part of my Kinetic Grace Integration system with you for FREE. It’s a guide called Holding S.P.A.C.E. and it breaks down the acronym to help you begin the process of trauma sensitive co-regulation. You’ll be able to use it with your classes immediately and might even help with everyone else you know...Go to elementalkinetics.com there will be a pop up and a banner, simply click on those and sign up for your free downloadable PDF copy of Holding S.P.A.C.E.
Be sure to tune in next week where you’ll meet my guest Dr. Kate Steiner and we’ll be discussing how to avoid burnout. You won’t want to miss it
Thanks for listening. Now go work IN.
I’m Ericka
Your host on The Work IN and owner and founder of Elemental Kinetics online studio.
My mission is to make trauma sensitive class design the gold standard in the fitness industry using a simple navigation system that any fit pro can use with any class format so they can make a lasting impact for their clients and avoid burnout.
If you’re interested in joining our next session click below to schedule a discovery call!