Is IDEA sending Precision Nutrition spam to everyone’s inbox?
Apparently this is a sponsor ad, but it’s important to clear some things up for anyone receiving this spammish Precision Nutrition certification ad.
1) The ad states only 1 in 10 fitness professionals have a nutrition certification:
That’s because a certification won’t increase salary. Why should every fitness professional have a nutrition certification? That’s like telling every Dietitian that they should have a fitness certification. They are two different specialities. There are nutritional professionals with years of practice and education to refer clients too for nutrition.
2 )The ad also states that fitness business is cutthroat but there is little competition with nutrition in fitness:
This is far fetched. Nutrition is also highly competitive, if not more, and jobs are far harder to find, almost impossible to find in some places. Not to mention that thousands of licensed nutritionists work within the fitness industry with board certifications now in sports dietetics. Don’t let them fool you on false statistics.
And it’s not like fitness professionals don’t already try to push nutrition – example, Crossfit and the Paleo Diet
3) The ad recommends that you’ll make more money
This is false. How can you up charge when you have no credentials for nutrition? The Precision Nutrition course is great for learning and gaining knowledge but it’s not like you can create meal plans for someone, as that is far out of scope of practice. Not to mention Precision Nutrition isn’t accredited and it’s also an open book test with no proctor. Open book tests can’t prove that a person is knowledgeable about nutrition.
There is nothing wrong with fitness professionals giving out some nutrition advice and helping clients be inspired to eat better, and you don’t need to shell out that kind of cash in order to achieve this.
Just understand what you’re getting into before spending hundreds of dollars based off of marketing that offers false hopes and skewed facts about nutrition in business.
Fitness and nutritional professionals need to work together instead of trying to compete with one another, crossing into one another’s scope of practice. So many people are more worried about money than they are about teaming together and to give clients the best experience.
I agree with your post.
Knowing something about nutrition is vital to anyone who works in fitness. Students and clients will often ask questions and it is helpful to be able to explain the basic science of the interplay of food intake and exercise output, for example. But just as I would refer someone who needed PT to a , well, to a PT, I would refer someone who wanted specific nutritional services to a nutritionist.
All aspects of work in fitness are tough to navigate these days….. groupon and an abundance of online, easy to get, open book tested ‘certifications’ have both contributed to this. Trainers who get top line training, develop networks with other professionals, and who set their expectations toward doing quality work and providing top notch service, who really connect with clients/students rather than seeing them as dollars and cents, will, I think, do well.
Yoga (my area) is a kind of funny world. What the nutritionist is to the trainer, the trained Ayurvedic practitioner is to the yoga teacher. Or rather, that is the traditional nutritional practice which goes back for decades and decades, as does yoga. If someone wants an Ayurvedic teacher I will send them there, though my baseline is usually to recommend a trained licensed nutritionist first, or someone who does both. Pretty much all yoga training (yoga certifications come in 200 and 500 hour variations, though that is really the groundwork to the practice) contain attention to diet. This attention is both philosophical and practical. Some schools (like Shivananda) have that interest more highly wound into their core practice, others less so. Even so, I would never offer nutritional services, beyond offering the occasional workshop on the current science of this area, or talking about things like why one might eat cleanly, or why yoga is associated with vegetarianism.
Thank you for an interesting post.