If you are interested in helping people live healthier lifestyles, you may want to consider becoming a personal trainer. The personal training profession is expected to grow 39% between 2020 and 2030.
However, preparing to become a personal trainer isn’t going to be easy. You need the right education and training to be certified and taken seriously.
To be taken seriously in the fitness community, personal trainers need to obtain certificates. Personal trainer certificates serve a variety of purposes. They can be helpful for everything from establishing trust with clients by showing the person has studied and been trained to do their job to providing trainers with the confidence in their knowledge and the education necessary to be effective in guiding clients through individualized fitness journeys. The ACE exam is an important step for anyone interested in becoming a certified and trusted personal trainer. It will help clients understand the benefits you will offer as a personal trainer.
Therefore, it is important for aspiring trainers to study for the American Council on Exercise (ACE) exam so they are better equipped to achieve success and fulfillment in their new career.
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Start by Reading the Book on Preparing for the ACE Exam
The book is essential for anyone studying for the ACE exam. For starters, almost everything on the exam itself is in the book. Therefore, studying the book inside and out will be very important for anyone preparing for the test.
Reading the book is a start, but actively reading the book will help immensely in retaining information and converting knowledge from short-term to long-term memory. This is the same advice we gave on studying for the NCLEX.
There are a plethora of ways to engage with the material in the book. You can use highlighters to indicate pieces of important information for better recall. Better yet, you can use a color-coordination scheme that makes sense to make important parts easier to recall. Additionally, post-it-notes, marginal connotation, and other mediums of note-keeping are also all very helpful in creating knowledge-retention.
Practice Exams
An ACE practice test is another wonderful tool that can help an aspiring trainer prepare for the real exam. An ACE practice test will give the testee real example questions that could appear on the test and will give the user a strong sense of how prepared they truly are. Additionally, taking a practice test with enough notice creates an opportunity for additional studying.
This can be advantageous especially if the practice test showcases the need to improve in one particular area or another. In that sense, the testee will be aware of what specific sections of the book they should return to. Having the chance to practice with authentic test questions is actually one of the best ways to practice for any exam. You can start by looking at the hardest ACE test exams.
Further, if planned accordingly, a trainer could give themselves enough time to schedule a pair of practice tests a week or so out from one another. That way, the first test would act as a benchmark for the trainer to test their initial studying against. Then the second test later on would give them an idea of whether or not the additional studying paid off, or if there’s still more work to be done.
Flash Cards
Memory and knowledge retention is extremely important for anyone in the personal training and fitness professions. In some fields of study, merely regurgitating information isn’t the best strategy. However, when it comes to learning about the muscles, anatomy and physiology, memorization with a focs on understanding is actually the key to learning the fundamentals. This is why a lot of the strategies that focus on preparing for these exams are dedicated to the absorption of information and knowledge from one’s short term memory to their long term memory. This is beneficial not only in the beginning of a person’s trainer career, but also in providing the foundational knowledge for a long and fulfilling vocation.
Flash cards are a great tool for pure memorization. The other thing about flashcards is they can be as in depth as their creator wants them to be. You could even fill them out with test-questions from a practice exam if you take one in the beginning of your study-journey.
Online Resources
Online resources are everything these days. People turn to the internet for all types of information in every single niche imaginable. There is no true definition of the breadth of knowledge that exists on the Internet. It’s expansive, and impossibly voluminous. It continues to grow every day. However, the Internet also offers a great deal of resources in that same respect.
There are videos, study guides, practice exams, sample questions, experiences other trainers have had, and there is so much more information that an aspiring trainer can soak up through various online resources. The most important thing to remember when it comes to trusting online resources, however, is the source vetting process. There is a bounty of quality, researched, and valid information available at a moment’s notice, and twice as much misinformation.
Understand How You Learn
Studying is a personal thing. As is learning in general. Understanding how you learn is extremely beneficial in creating study habits that are effective and fulfilling. At a basic level, some people are visual learners, while others are audio-processors, there are readers, conversationalists, and of course there are those that learn best from doing. The on-hands approach.
Learning which learning strategies work best for you will make studying for the ACE exam a cakewalk. Actively read the chapters in the book, use diagrams and charts to help with comprehension, look online for additional resources, and when you’re feeling ready to test your knowledge, get signed up for an ACE practice exam. That will truly give you a strong benchmark.
