Glute Specialist Course Review

The ISSA Glute Specialist Course

The ISSA Glute Specialist Course is, as the name suggests, a specialization designed as an add-on for certified personal trainers. It focuses on building glutes, figuring out why glutes might not be developing in clients, or how clients might be training their glutes the wrong way. There is a lot of information on corrective exercises for improving glute strength and performance, as well as exercises beyond simple lunges and squats. This can be a great way to reach out to a wider base of clients including those who want better mobility and strength. But is it worth it?

Cost

• Around $640

What’s Included in the Cost

• Online platform with an easy-to-use dashboard
• Online content tracks your progress and shows individual, weekly modules that can follow if you prefer
• Video content included in each chapter
• Friendly online resources, like study aid videos for individual exercises, and hardcover books available for purchase
• Open-book and untimed quizzes after each chapter
• Final exam is taken online, untimed, and open book, with 2 free chances to pass; no stress

CE Credits

• 20 credits–If you have any other certification and you need continuing education unit, this can help you meet that 2-year renewal requirement

What I Love

• This is an EREPS Approved Training Course – 10 LLP Points

What I Don’t Love

• How ISSA markets this with CAPS for catchy marketing terms like “add STATUS to your resume” and “make more MONEY”–this isn’t an infomercial from the 90s
• That the course legitimately says glute specialists can help their clients get “post-worthy results”

Curriculum

I’m going to start with my conflicting feelings about the curriculum. 

At face value, I was intrigued because I know that leg strength is an indicator of several components of overall health, especially as we age. Leg strength with things like squats can be one of the biggest indicators of stability in older populations and has a direct correlation to risk of falls, which has a direct correlation to risks of hip injuries, which has a direct correlation to longevity (1 in 3 people who have a hip replacement will die within a few years). 

So I take leg strength very seriously. 

I also work with a lot of people who are pre-diabetic or diabetic and working your glutes and the rest of your legs, the big muscle groups, is one of the fastest and easiest ways to keep your blood sugar levels where they should be; doing a few minutes of squats with just your body weight, going for a brisk run, or doing a simple power walk for a quick 10 minute break several times throughout the day can keep your blood sugar levels lower.

As the biggest muscle group in the body, it’s important to focus on leg strength and glute strength. I love the content that focuses on the biomechanics of the body and which exercises can strengthen overall power and form.

However…

I was genuinely worried when I first looked into this course that it would be a fluff course, basically something that was all about vanity, and to some extent, it comes off that way, especially in the marketing material.

The ISSA website has a lot of really gimmicky words, in bold and CAPS, that focus on how training the glutes is an in-demand career right now, that adds status to your resume and helps you make more money, and helps you ensure that your clients get post-worthy results.

I promise you that there are several more examples, but I’m going to stop there because that’s enough to make me barf. 

Sure, everyone wants a nice, perky butt, but glute health extends so much more beyond taking gym bathroom selfies for IG. And as a coach, I don’t think that we should be encouraging the superficial aspect of glute training when there is so much more to the longevity of glute training. 

If superficiality is all we are openly focused on, then, ISSA, you might as well create a “Pectoral Specialist” program next, because I’ve never worked with a male client who was happy with the size of his pecks. 

Pros:

• This course is an approved training course by the European Register of Exercise Professionals, so if you are an instructor, trainer, or teacher in Europe, this is an appropriate qualification(s) to ensure that people can work out safely and effectively.
• There are a lot of applications for different glute-based workouts across different groups, making this a cert applicable to different fitness professionals.
• The course content gives foundational knowledge in addressing tight hip flexors and weak glutes, something that is increasingly prevalent among sedentary individuals, and these can both negatively impact quality of life and fitness.
• Being entirely online, it is much more accessible, especially for someone like myself who doesn’t have a consistent schedule week to week and might be able to work on content one week, then miss the next week, then go back the third week and do double the content.
• The programming helps with much more effective exercises beyond squats and lunges, like hip thrusts and kettlebell swings, which really covers all the different planes of motion.
• It is a highly niche course that other organizations don’t offer.
• You can reach a higher range of clients, potentially, those who want to improve athletic performance, those who want better posture, those who want to reduce things like back pain, and those who want the aesthetic benefits of glute workouts.

Cons:

• It is an entirely online, open-book course, so it isn’t as challenging or demanding as things like in-person courses or courses with in-person tests. It’s entirely up to you as the student to take things seriously and absorb as much material as you can. 
• As an entirely online course, it doesn’t have any hands-on components. I can tell you that this might present a bit of a learning curve when you start coaching because your first few clients will basically be the guinea pigs you work with as you learn how to, in real time, figure out where or what a client is doing incorrectly with their form and adjust accordingly.
• The course is not designed to be a standalone course; it’s meant to be a specialization for someone who is already a certified personal trainer.
• The specialist courses like these don’t have the option for NCCA-accredited exams.

Course Length

The course is designed with weekly modules and a self-paced study set that you can follow. If you follow this, it will take 12 weeks or 3 months to finish. However, you can choose to study at a slower pace as long as you finish within 8 months.

Dashboard

When you sign up for the glute specialization course, you’ll find a personalized dashboard where all of your information is contained. This dashboard gives you access to each of the modules as they are broken down by ISSA, shows you your progress, and gives you access to things like study aids. 

The study aids include the Hyperstrike Exercise Video Library, a collection of videos showing hundreds of exercises from different angles so you know how to safely teach them to your clients. So all of the exercises that you read about in the textbook can be looked up and viewed so that you can practice them yourself and see how they should be executed.

Since the ISSA course doesn’t have any hands-on training opportunities, this video library is the next best thing.

You also get access to the bookstore, where you can purchase hard copies of all the available textbooks, including the textbook for the glute specialization course. 

Textbook

The textbook is surprisingly robust. It is mostly good content that focuses on the health aspects of glute training, like:

• The kinetic chain 
• Lumbopelvic hip complex structure and function
• Flute and hip dysfunctions, including pelvic tilt, inactive glutes, tight hip flexors, and asymmetrical weight shift

Then it moves on to developing programs with things like:

• Acute training variables
• Applications of deactivation
• Activation for mobility and balance
• Hypertrophy and strength training
• Nutrition and supplementation

And this is the point where things shift away from the science of glute training and back toward that sort of gimmicky, barf-inducing infomercial. At this point, there is an entire chapter on client motivation. Client motivation is an essential component to any form of coaching, and there’s a reason you will find information on the psychology of motivation included in just about every certification for fitness professionals. 

I’ve taken several ISSA certifications, and I’m always happy to read about client motivation, but the difference with the ISSA glute specialist course is that the motivation chapter doesn’t center on the psychology of motivation.

It centers on the most obvious, self-indulgent vanity. 

It includes things like using social media to stay motivated and posting on social media, creating Facebook groups for continued posting of pictures regarding glute progress. 

I don’t care what you call it; “glute progress” in this sense is basically just butt shots. So even if you’re creating a members-only Facebook group for people who are in a group training session, you’re doing nothing but sharing photos of your butt on social media.

Pretend all you want that the idea is behind self-motivation by seeing your fitness results. If that were genuinely true, these types of motivational tools would be included in all the training courses and not just the glute specialist course. 

Then it wraps up with chapters on how to run your business, market yourself as a professional, and all of the documents that you can download. 

The appendices contain client forms, 6-week glute training programs you can use, and help with navigating diets. The third appendix on trending diet seems like it’s a shot-for-shot copy of one of the nutrition coach certification chapters, but that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. It just means that if you are a certified nutrition coach already, you’ll see a lot of overlap, and the best way to learn is through repetition.

Career Support

As soon as you sign up for the course, you’ll have access to a lot of career support tools. These are there to help you build your business as a fitness coach with a glute specialization. You get access to all of these tools so long as you maintain your certification. They include things like:

• Business cards
• Business guide step-by-step
• Use of the ISSA-certified logo
• A free website
• Trainer PDF forms
• Personal health coverage
• Access to a medical fitness network
• Liability insurance

ISSA is also one of the few organizations out there that offers a job marketplace where you can apply to jobs in your area long before you’ve even finished your glute specialization course. As soon as you’ve signed up, you can start looking for jobs at local gyms in your area if you don’t currently have a job, and you might find one that’s looking for a certified personal trainer with glute specialization, or you might be able to apply as a personal trainer and then offer that specialization.

This job board is very impressive, one of the better aspects to the ISSA organization in my opinion, because they partner with widely recognized brands and organizations in the fitness industry that specifically look for people with ISSA certs. 

Summing Up

The ISSA glute specialist course is definitely worth it. I think it’s a great addition for someone who is a certified personal trainer because there are several ways in which glute training can be applied to different demographics. The more you know about properly training glutes to increase stability, mobility, and flexibility, especially in the hip flexors, the more you can help people in recovery, athletes, new moms, those who are sedentary, and everyone in between.

That said, if you’re like me, you’ll have to just grit your teeth and get through the chapter on sharing butt pictures on social media (sorry, “progress photos”) and focus more on the relevant scientific information in all the other chapters.