Almost ready to take the exam
I feel very close now. I did my third practice exam this weekend. Didn’t score as well as I should have, but at least I know what I did wrong. I was rushing a bit and didn’t read things as closely as I should have. I got 3-4 questions wrong for that reason and that reason alone. They’re good about hitting you with some very nuanced questions that you really have to read closely and think about for a bit.
There are a few areas where I’m still a bit weak, and that’s what I’m working on now. I’m still rusty with biomechanics and with the nitty-gritty details of muscles. This is stuff they don’t really cover in the training materials but still expect you to know. Fortunately I have another book devoted to skeletal muscle, so I’ve been spending a lot of time studying that to make sure I know where the rectus femoris originates and inserts and stuff like that.
Aside from that, I need to keep brushing up on plyometric exercises, techniques for aerobic exercises I don’t normally do myself, and gym construction/equipment layout stuff. Of all the stuff in the book, these are the things I don’t really encounter at all, so I don’t have much intuition to fall back on. I keep getting tripped up by questions about swimming technique and things like that.
I really want to get a better foundation in biomechanics, so I’m going to be studying that more after I do my certification. It’s a lot of fun being able to deconstruct an exercise and figure out exactly what parts of what muscles are involved and how. It’s proving really useful during my own workouts, too. The more I learn, the more I feel connected to what’s going on under my skin.
