2 vital things I did to pass NASM-CPT

by Positivity

I just took the NASM exam this morning and passed on the first time. I read a lot of the comments on this site and was a little nervous due to a lot of people saying how hard it was and how the study materials left them completely unprepared, etc. So for all of you out there considering it, or currently enrolled and biting your nails with worry, here's some good news.

In restaurants and foodservice, customers are more likely to voice their complaints than positivity or satisfaction. After taking the NASM exam, I've come to the conclusion that the same applies here... All the disparaging comments should be taken with a grain of salt, because the exam is totally passable, IF you study hard and right.

2 things I did that I would recommend to EVERYONE, regardless of your personal study habits:

1. As I read through the book, I made a flash card for EVERY SINGLE vocabulary word that appears in blue in the text. Then as part of my review, I quizzed myself relentlessly on every single one till I got them right. Yes, you end up with a very large stack of notecards and no, not every one of them can appear on the 120 question exam, BUT a very significant percentage of the questions DO depend on you knowing the definition of one of those blue words.

2. I read through most of the user comments on this site, cutting and pasting the POSITIVE ones that tell you what the poster encountered on the exam, onto a Word document. Pretty soon you start to see significant overlap in the topics suggested. Then I pared it down by combining related topics from the posts and eliminating repeats until I had a very comprehensive study guide. For every bullet point in this new study guide, I went back through the book and filled in as much information as the specific chapter had, and made sure I knew it cold.

I'll never know if I would have passed without doing those two things, but my feeling is my chances would have been iffy at best. I do know for certain that I would have been SIGNIFICANTLY less prepared for the specificity of many of the questions.

A few general tips, mostly echoing previous user comments...

READ each question CAREFULLY, some are worded to trick you at a glance (like a question that asked what choice was not a part of NASM's code of professionalism, and all were right from the textbook - until you read closer and found one of the choices was "always giving the impression that any question is inconvenient, unnecessary, or unintelligent"). Know your nutrition (percentages, intakes, etc.) Know the OPT model (phase-specific exercises, progressions, regressions, specifics of all the acute variables, etc.)

Good luck! you'll do fine.