Model
Digital Document
Publisher
Florida Atlantic University
Description
Recent anecdotal reports, surveys, studies and litigation have questioned the competency of commercial fitness instructors to provide safe and effective exercise programming. This research study was designed to measure, within the State of Florida, commercial fitness instructors' knowledge base in exercise science, a knowledge base which relates to one's ability to deliver competent instruction. To determine adequacy of exercise science knowledge, test scores of commercial fitness instructors were compared to that of fitness instructors certified by the American College of Sports Medicine. It was hypothesized that commercial fitness instructors within the State lack appropriate training and, therefore, would not demonstrate a comparable exercise science knowledge base to ACSM instructors who have to meet requisite standards to become certified. Samples of commercial instructors were drawn from five geographically distributed, large metropolitan areas within the State; and their testing scores and those of an ACSM sample were statistically treated with One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). ACSM instructors scored over twice as high as commercial instructors on the testing instrument; and ANOVA reflected a significant difference that supported the research hypothesis. It was concluded that commercial fitness instructors in the State of Florida have significantly less knowledge of exercise science than ACSM certified Health/Fitness instructors which lends credence to the concern that perhaps practicing instructors are incapable of delivering safe and effective exercise programming.
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