I love getting mail, especially when that mail contains food. Luckily, I have a mom who loves food as much as I do and often get tasty packages from her. Last week, I got two totally unexpected packages of food.
Amie from The Healthy Apple send me these little goodies. YUM! I haven’t had Larabars for a few months (since Costco stopped carrying them) and was so excited to have them again. I’d forgotten how much I like these things…guess I’ll be adding them back to my Whole Foods grocery list! Thanks so much for the surprise Amie! 
I also got a bag of these (sorry…I didn’t quite make it to the camera to take a picture of them before I opened them)
with this letter from my sister-in-law (and my bro, nephew and niece)
Allow me to translate the contents if you can’t read it on your computer screen.
“Teri – The time has come for an intervention. The recent nature of your blog posts (kale, loafs, dried beans) has us deeply concerned for the continued integrity of your fragile taste buds. They are being inundated with foods in opposition to what we feel is right. And yummy. And fattening. And caloric. While we respect your desire to be a foodie who stays fit, we strongly recommend that you devour this entire bag of sugary, chocolatey, goodness within 48 hours. Severe consequences will follow if our desires are not met.
With regards,
Jesse, Ashly, Clark, & Ava”
BAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! I love my sister-in-law. I still laugh out loud every time I read this letter.
FYI, I met her demands.
If you missed part one, catch up here.
The AFAA Group Ex cert is pretty easy to obtain, but it is well respected since you can’t just take it online like many you’ll see out there. When you go online to schedule your exam date, you’ll need to pay for the certification and study materials which will be shipped to you. The certification is $300 and the study materials are around $40. Pricey, I know, but you’ll make it back once you start teaching. [I will tell you about a cheaper AFAA Group Ex cert option in a future post so look for that if you want to save moolah.]
In the study materials will be a study guide – fill it out! It basically outlines the written exam. On your scheduled exam day, they do review what will be on the written exam on test day, but if you haven’t studied, you’ll be in trouble since the questions get pretty detailed. It’s not hard, but it will require studying. Lots of people came in with blank study guides and bombed the test. I completed my study guide and got 100% on the test. 
While you are studying in the month or two before test day, get your CPR certification done too. Almost every gym requires their group ex instructors to have it so even if you get your AFAA cert, you can’t teach if you don’t have your CPR cert. Find your local Red Cross for a schedule.
On your exam day [which is usually held at a gym or some sort of rec center], you’ll take a written test and a practical test. They scheduled a full day for me [8 hours], but I was there only for about 6 hours. In the morning they review everything that will be on the written exam and show you what they will be looking for when grading the practical exam.
In the afternoon, you’ll do the practical exam which involves doing a short individual demo teaching a specific exercise [I demonstrated squats] and also a group practical exam where they will call out a muscle group and you just have to demonstrate the proper way to perform an exercise for that muscle [e.g. biceps = do a bicep curl. Easy, right?]. They are fairly particular about some exercises they don’t want to see and about the form on some of them, but they’ll go over all of that before the official test.
Stay tuned for what you do after you get your test results!
Tagged as:
group fitness
I also got a bag of these (sorry…I didn’t quite make it to the camera to take a picture of them before I opened them)
with this letter from my sister-in-law (and my bro, nephew and niece)
Allow me to translate the contents if you can’t read it on your computer screen.
