Im Back, and have Good News

Well, its been a while since my last post. What have I been doing? Not much. Spent two weeks in Spain with my Girlfriend not doing much. I was meant to take some material with me to study whilst sitting by the pool, but I “forgot” that by “accident”.. Nah, really I did.

Last Monday, I got an e-mail from my helpful Co-ordinator at Future Fit offering me the chance to move my Gym Instructor course forward to the 31st July, so I accepted that, as I didn’t fancy waiting around till September. Only problem was, this gave me 2 weeks to sit and pass my Anatomy Exams.

Feeling confident and after a quick read of my revision notes, I sat the exams in my bedroom on my laptop last Monday. The procedure is pretty straight forward, you have to do 4 exams, one after another, answering 25 questions per exam, with a time limit of 15 minutes.

To pass the exams I need to score 80% overall, but also score a minimum of 18/25 in each section.

Going in to the exams I felt confident that I would get the minimum of 18 in each section, but for some reason I completely forgot that to get 80% overall, I would need to average 20/25 in all 4 sections. So as I was sitting the tests, in the back of my mind I only thought I needed 18 right answers per exam.

The first exam was the Skeleton, a subject I felt comfortable in and thought I would do pretty well. The usual questions came up, what bone was attached to this bone etc. and I completed that exam in about 11 minutes.

Next up was the Muscles, something that I didn’t feel to confident on, I know where the major muscles are in my body (that’s simple), but it’s the theory behind how they each work and what they are made up ofI had trouble getting my head around when I was studying. Luckily most of the questions were straight forward and I felt I had done ok.

Thirdly, my hardest subject, the Heart and Respiration system, something I found hard to grasp whilst studying and a subject that would require some luck to pass.

And lastly, was the Introduction to Exercise, my favourite subject to learn and one I felt I would have no troubles with… how wrong was I? A few of the questions I got were pretty tricky, and my confidence on the subject was lost.

As I finished my exams, heart pounding, I started to Google some of the questions I was asked just to check my answers. It looked like I did ok, but wouldn’t find out until 2 days later.

Wednesday arrived and I got an email with my results… unfortunately I had only got 77%… Dam it. 3% out, 3 freaking questions out!!! Fortunately, I did score the minimum 18/25 in each subject, so this meant that I had the opportunity to increase my score by answering some oral questions over the phone. Well, that seems nerve racking!!

Surprisingly, I actually scored highest in the Heart and Respiration system. My results were:

Skeleton: 19/25

Muscle: 18/25

Heart & Respiration: 22/25

Intro to Exercise: 18/25

On Thursday I was contacted by a Distant Learning Tutor and was told I needed to answer 3 questions to pass. He said that as I was so close in passing that he would ask me the easier questions…

1) What bones make up the Shoulder Griddle

2) What muscle is used in an Arm Curl

3) What is FITT

I managed to answer these questions correctly, and completed the first step in becoming a Personal Trainer. Woop.

 So my next step is attending the Gym Instructor work shop, followed by an Assessment 4 weeks later. Will let you know how I get on this weekend.