IHRSA - Jan 2005 CBI Cert

The Curse of Questionable Certifications

IHRSA, certifying agencies, and club owners are working to protect, and reassure, consumers

By Jon Feld

Two years ago, the health and fitness club industry's attention was riveted by a new problem: the dangers associated with unqualified instruction.

The issue rose to national prominence, virtually overnight, when a Long Island man, whose wife had died after taking supplements recommended by an uncertified personal trainer, sued him, the club he had worked for, and the supplements company for a total of $320 million.

The case prompted a special investigative report by CBS's Dan Rather, and a flurry of similar "exposés" by hundreds of reporters, for print and electronic media, coast to coast. In one particularly embarrassing instance, a TV producer with no fitness experience, but with a $39 personal training certificate that she had purchased online, was offered a job with a club.

The death, lawsuit, and intense press coverage tainted the industry's image, stoking consumer skepticism, but also spotlighted a real, and growing, dilemma: one bred by occasionally incompetent advice, a jump in the number of certifying agencies, and a proliferation of certifications-many of them of dubious value. The results: increased confusion on the part of club owners, and reduced confidence on the part of the public.

Industry critics spoke of the need for high and uniform standards, and suggested that government might have to intervene.

The sudden, dramatic, development also prompted IHRSA's board of directors to initiate discussions with the industry's premier, personal-training certification organizations to identify ways to safeguard consumers effectively. One of the first solutions suggested was to utilize third-party accreditation expertise-an approach that has proven invaluable in other fields, such as medicine.

The objective: to upgrade and guarantee the value of a certification by requiring that the issuing agency, itself, be certified.

Recently, IHRSA advised its member clubs that, beginning next year, they should strive to hire only personal trainers who hold at least one certification from a group that has obtained third-party approval of its certification procedures and protocols from an appropriate entity. One such organization, IHRSA notes, is the National Commission of Certifying Agencies (NCCA), a nationally recognized body with a 27-year history of assessing certifying groups; the NCCA currently accredits more than 160 programs in a variety of industries, including counseling, construction, healthcare, and financial services.

In October, meeting with representatives of some 20 certifying and other interested parties at the Club Industry conference in Chicago, IHRSA continued to explore the subject of criteria, and to attempt to identify other third-party providers of NCCA's standing. "The three-hour meeting produced a very positive outcome," reports Bill Howland, the association's director of public relations and research. "A number of certifying groups have already started, or completed, the process for NCCA accreditation."

"We're making progress, but there's still more work to do," he observes.

Howland's statement, though accurate, is something of an understatement. While headway is being made, the basic problem is still expanding, driven by increases in the number of disciplines, instructors, certifications, certifying agencies, and club members. Fitness, group exercise, yoga, Pilates-all, like personal training, are subject to uneven, and sometimes ambiguous, oversight and regulation. Today, there are more than 300 fitness-related certifying entities, and, if you do a Google search on the topic, you'll come up with more than half-a-million citations.

Participation in Pilates, for instance, has shot from 2.5 million in 2001 to nearly 9 million today, and Kevin Bowen, the president of the Pilates Method Alliance, estimates that only about one-quarter of the 13,000 active instructors in the U.S. are adequately trained.

For the foreseeable future, the industry, IHRSA, and individual club owners clearly have their work cut out for them.

Jon Feld is a contributing editor for CBI and can be reached at kjfeld@rcn.com.