Most fitness professionals get into the industry to pursue a particular area they feel passionate about. Whether that’s helping people to have pain-free movement, helping people to rehab from minor injuries or overcome conditions, or perhaps helping to boost athletic performance, getting your Personal Training Diploma is just the beginning step on that journey.
To be successful in your chosen specialism, it’s important to actively plan towards carving a niche that will help you to stand out from the competition. Often, this involves diversifying your skillset and expanding your knowledge and skills, which is why investing in your education makes a lot of sense.
If you’re seeking a career in the high-octane world of performance improvement, you’re in fierce company that’s going to test you if you want to make it to the top. Much like the athletes themselves, the competition to make it as a Strength & Conditioning coach is strong, but the rewards are high. This blog will tell you more about that, and we’ll explain why you might choose to get a strength & conditioning qualification and how you can use it to expand your fitness career.
Why Should I Specialize in Strength & Conditioning?
A strength & conditioning qualification will teach you the principles of exercises, programming and periodization that improve a client’s athletic performance, such as power, endurance, strength and speed. It will also teach you how to measure and analyze data too. It is this specialist approach which enables an S&C Coach to continually improve their client’s programs.
Therefore, the most obvious client-group who a Strength & Conditioning qualification attracts are athletes and aspiring athletes. Your enhanced knowledge of the anatomy and how to apply exercises (to make changes to a client’s body composition and fitness) is what will make you stand out from qualified Personal Trainers.
With this expertise, you can design realistic programs to help a specific client and their needs to perform better in their sport. So, if being part of elite sport with like-minded competitive athletes is something that excites you, this is certainly a qualification you need to explore.
However, it isn’t just for professional sports. Nowadays, Strength & Conditioning principles can also be useful for clients who are perhaps fitness enthusiasts or who enjoy competitions.
It’s not uncommon to have clients that aren’t professional athletes but are still looking to improve their half-marathon race time or their deadlift PR for amateur powerlifting competitions. While you may think this is a male dominated area, we are also seeing S&C growing in female fitness too.
How to Become a Strength and Conditioning Specialist
You may not be surprised to learn there are a number of routes to becoming an S&C Coach. You may decide the route is through university, undertaking a comprehensive academic degree in Sports Science where you’ll gain an in-depth knowledge of anatomy and analysis before entering a professional sports environment.
Alternatively, like many others, you may decide to get your Personal Training Diploma, gain experience and build your professional reputation before taking a practical course through a Fitness Education provider.
While the former provides a degree qualification to your name – which is something to be celebrated – the benefits of the latter are a dramatically reduced time to get qualified and a far less expensive route than going to university.
Ultimately, we recommend you do your due diligence by researching the target areas you wish to work in and see what qualifications they require before you commit to one route or the other.
Conclusion:
At T2, our Strength & Conditioning course will give you the necessary technical knowledge about plyometrics, Olympic lifting, power, SAQ, CV, and other fundamental approaches that will help your clients achieve their desired results through your training.
Furthermore, you will understand the core fundamentals of periodization, planning, but also the best way how to access your clients’ abilities, which will all help you develop unique training programs tailored to their needs.
If your passion is working in the high-performance world of sport, this is a specialism worth investing in and we offer flexible payment plans to help you launch your new career.
Get in touch with one of our team for more information.
