Blog
By PT Hut
At a Level 3 personal trainer practical assessment, you deliver a real personal training session while a qualified assessor watches you and assesses you against criteria you have seen in advance. The assessor is checking that you can coach a real person safely and well, which is something no written test can show. The written side of the qualification is assessed separately, through coursework.
On our Level 3 Diploma, the practical is 1 to 2 days in person, at the venue published with your intake. You deliver a full session, start to finish, and an assessor who works as a trainer themselves watches it. The practical days build up to the assessment rather than dropping you into it cold, and if you do not meet a criterion first time, you are told what to fix and given a route to be re-assessed, which we do not charge for.
You arrive with a session you have planned for the person you are going to coach. Before any exercise, you screen them, asking about their health, their history and what they want from the session, so you know whether the plan still suits them. Then you coach the session itself, demonstrating, cueing and correcting as you go, and changing the plan if something in front of you says it should change.
The assessor watches the whole of it. This is the day the qualification turns real, because you are doing the job itself, with somebody who trains people for a living watching you do it.
Every practical assessment on our course has a published set of criteria, and you see them before you are assessed. The assessor is watching for five things.
The last one is on the list because a personal trainer's living depends on clients who come back after a first session. Daniel and Clinton, who assess the practical, have each worked with more than 400 clients.
The largest unit in the diploma is Delivering Exercise Programmes for Personal Training Sessions, worth 9 of its 51 credits. Focus Awards, who award the qualification, publish the full unit list. The delivery unit covers running the session itself, including cueing, correcting and adapting on the spot, which is what you do on the practical days.
It sits on top of a Level 2 practical, supervised gym instructing, which is built into the diploma too. If you are new to the levels, our post on the difference between a Level 2 and a Level 3 explains what each level adds.
CIMSPA describes personal trainers as coaching clients one to one or in small groups towards their health and fitness goals, and the practical is where you show you can.
The theory units are evidenced through workbooks you complete in your own time, with your tutor checking in along the way. There is no exam hall and no timed paper, and no single sitting decides whether you pass.
If something in your written work is not right first time, your tutor tells you what is missing and you put it right. That is how a competence-based qualification is meant to work.
Each intake holds five places for learners who cannot get to the venue. They complete the same practical assessment on film instead of in person, and the qualification they receive is identical. There are only five of these places per intake, so mention it when you reserve.
In our experience, getting a client's movement right before adding load works better than planning a demanding session to impress, because the assessor is watching whether the person is safe and whether your coaching makes sense to them, and a heavy session with shaky technique fails both. Clinton teaches the practical the way he coaches, getting the movement right first and then loading it, and he has more than 20 years in the industry behind that habit.
A session rarely goes exactly to plan. A knee complains, the machine you wanted is taken, or the person arrives more tired than you expected. The assessor wants to see what you do then, which is why knowing your plan well enough to change it matters more than knowing it word for word.
Say your plan opens with goblet squats, and in the screening the person mentions a knee that has been sore since a run at the weekend. Adapting might mean a shorter range of movement they can manage without pain, a different exercise for the same muscles, or leaving it out today and explaining why, with a suggestion to get the knee checked if it sounds like more than a niggle. Any of those can be right. What the assessor wants to see is that you asked, that you listened, and that the session changed because of the answer.
A few habits help on the day.
Not meeting a criterion tells you what to work on. You are given what to fix and a route to be re-assessed, and a re-assessment is part of the price rather than an extra, as our breakdown of what the course costs sets out.
You will also know where you stand before the day. Your tutor will have seen your work and told you whether you are ready, and because Daniel and Clinton teach and assess the course themselves, the person who tells you that is the person who assesses you.
The assessment page sets out the practical days in full, and the dates page shows the next intakes. If you want to ask about a remote place, or anything else about assessment day, get in touch through the reservation form and we will reply by email.
Blog
A Level 2 qualifies you as a gym instructor, and a Level 3 qualifies you as a personal trainer. A gym instructor inducts members, screens them, demonstrates equipment and looks after the gym floor. A personal trainer coaches individual clients towards their own goals, with a programme, nutrition advice and lifestyle support designed around each person, and may be self-employed, running their own business.
Our Level 3 personal trainer course costs £2,000, or £1,750 if you pay the whole amount up front. You can also spread it across four monthly payments of £500, which adds up to the same £2,000 with nothing on top. That price covers tuition, learning materials, assessment and certification, and it includes the Level 2 gym instructing units, so there is no second course to buy before you start.
Reserve
Tell us which intake you want. Nothing is charged here: we email you to arrange payment, and paying is what confirms your place.
Rather talk it through first? Email pthutuk@gmail.com.
