Becoming a Certified Physical Preparation Specialist

Last year I committed to undertaking the Certified Physical Preparation Specialist (CPPS) course online (no trips to the USA for me) as I knew it would be a valuable investment in my own professional development as a personal trainer.

I’ve followed Joe De Franco for years online through my own research into strength and conditioning coaching for particular sports. Most of his coaching is geared towards American Football, but there’s a lot of transferable information and skills to other high performance sports.

Through my interest in Joe’s work, I discovered Jim Smith and soon realised they are business partners and major contributors to the CPPS course, alongside Brian Oberther and Dean Somerset.

One of the things to bare in mind if you are thinking about doing the online version of the course is that you don’t get immediate feedback on some of the practical components, so you have to be strict on yourself to make sure you really gain a theoretical and practical understanding of the concepts and techniques you cover.

If you already have an Olympic lifting or Power lifting background you probably don’t have to practice along the way so much, but you might need to put some more focus into your mobility or breath work.

The course itself covers quite a lot, and even if you’re an experienced coach you will still learn a lot. If you’ve had limited coaching experience you are guaranteed to learn heaps!

There are about 26 modules covering everything from breath work, facia, fundamental movement patterns, power, speed, strength, assessments, program design, marketing and sprint work.

And then another 20 or so modules on Olympic Lifting.

When you sign up to the course you’ll receive a pdf booklet to download. Funnily enough, while I was completing the course, the booklet got updated from 45 pages to 128 pages with way more detail. I’m a nerd so I decided to use it as a refresher to go through in my own time.

Most of the video content for the modules were filmed at a recent seminar - it’s high quality and professional so it’s easy to and it’s filmed well to make it easy for us to watch and understand.

The CPPS course ends with two tests. The first one is a multiple choice test with around 120 questions - I had a few technical issues while i was doing it but it’s been fixed now.

Once you pass the test you have to complete a few video-based tasks that you film and send through via YouTube. This covers off on your ability to teach some fundamental movements and breath work.

I really enjoyed the CPPS course. They grab the most useful and current information and make it make sense to anyone participating. I got quite a lot out of this certification and if you’re also interested in it I would definitely recommend it.

The course links to a level two certification and they now offer a CPPS Masters Program. Both Joe and Jim have put a lot of work into it and it shows.

They have heaps to offer online from podcasts, online programs, merchandise, dvd’s and of course certifications.

If you’re keen to chat more about my experience with the course feel free to get in touch. Oh and for the record, this is not a sponsored post - I just like reviewing and sharing!