Health & Fitness Continuing Education Workshops and Certifications

What happens to a new mom’s abdominal muscles? Which ab muscles should you work on, but most of all, how should you work out these muscles? During the workshop, we will discuss the impacts of pregnancy on abdominal muscles, how to strengthen these core muscles, and how to progress through the exercises. And, of course, the diastase and pelvic floor will also be covered. 

In this interactive workshop, Active Aging: The Right Exercise, The Right Way (3 hours), we will address the following points:

1.  Understand common areas of weakness in older clients regarding posture and fitness technique.
2.  Discover ways to target these areas and use conscious exercise to improve overall posture and technique.
3. Discuss the importance of gradual exercise progression from foundational movement to more complex exercise to ensure safety and lasting results. 
4. Develop observation skills to better determine exercise choice in relation to point 1 and 2, as well as how to effectively regress, modify and progress these exercises to obtain amazing fitness benefits. 

The best of both worlds! Build strength, mobility, balance, and stability like never before by fusing yoga with fitness. Using body weight and a variety of home-workout props as further resistance, we will unlock the potential of fitness movement patterns combined with yoga asanas and flows. Your clients will no longer have to choose between their yoga and training sessions; they’ll namaste and namastyay!

Thriving at the elite level of sport via a vegetarian diet is entirely possible! What are the specific macronutrient needs that must be met to ensure this optimal performance? See how to adapt your vegetarian diet to your active lifestyle and benefit from the expertise of a clinical dietician supporting athletes in her private practice in this three-hour workshop that includes:

• how to better control fibre intake around training bouts
• what types of protein to choose and how to complement daily intakes to fulfill needs
• the underrated power of adequate hydration
• specific micronutrients that have an impact on performance: omega-3, calcium, iron and vitamin B12
• timing of pre- and post-training meals
• tips for efficient meal preparation with a busy schedule

Coming up with new class plans doesn’t have to be tedious and time consuming! With this easily reproducible “3 key” strategy, you will learn to confidently create HIIT, bootcamp or muscle conditioning class plans that are functional and balanced, while saving you time and sparking your creativity.

This workshop aims to provide health and fitness professionals with some introductory tools into the basic concepts of nutrition. It then helps them navigate through some of the food and supplement studies and anecdotes that are either motivated by ideology or grounded in scientific evidence.

Many of us are female coaches or train female clients.   Why do we have such a difficult time talking about menstrual cycles? Why is the topic of menses so taboo? Our cycles can provide us with invaluable information about our health as well as impact our day-to-day activities, including exercise. As coaches and trainers, we need to be cycle savvy. We must be confident and comfortable asking the right questions and guiding our female clients appropriately. Learn the physiological changes during each phase and how that can potentially affect your clients’ workouts. We’ll include exercise suggestions and strategies for each phase.

Most cycle certification programs cover the basic physiology required to design classes that mix short intervals of high intensity with intervals of lower intensity. There is not usually enough time to explain the details of energy systems and appropriate interval training. 
A better understanding of these will add variety to your classes, beyond the repetitious “sit—stand—fast—slow” cues often used in creating drills. Using energy system training will also allow you to design more varied and interesting class profiles; most class participants enjoy learning new techniques, and almost all will thrive on becoming stronger cyclists.

In this workshop, a brief overview of the different types of diabetes will be presented, followed by the tools the fitness professional should have to best support their client living with diabetes or at risk for getting diabetes.

This six-hour gap course for trainers with existing YMCA Canada Individual Conditioning Certification to upgrade/update their certification to YMCA Canada Personal Trainer has been developed. This course can also be taken to obtain continuing education credits for all the FIT certifications.

This six-hour gap course for trainers with existing YMCA Canada Individual Conditioning Certification to upgrade/update their certification to YMCA Canada Personal Trainer has been developed. This course can also be taken to obtain continuing education credits for all the FIT certifications.