ISSA vs Precision Nutrition

If you are looking for certifications as nutrition coaches or other health professionals, you have a lot of options out there, particularly Precision Nutrition and ISSA. 

ISSA

The International Sports Sciences Association, ISSA, is a leading Fitness and Nutrition education provider, with over 24 fitness certifications and support for career advancement in the form of things like guaranteed job placement. This company has been around since 1988, specializing in online learning for fitness certifications. 

Precision Nutrition

Precision Nutrition is a leading company for nutrition coaching, certifications, and nutrition software. The company was started in 2005 to help clients receive certifications in multiple levels of nutrition with an online coaching platform. 

So how do they compare? I looked into:

1. The certifications they offer
2. The cost
3. Any prerequisites
4. The types of study materials they give and final exams
5. Validity

Bottom line: Precision Nutrition is great at nutrition. That’s about it. ISSA is great at everything else. 

Let’s see how they compare. 

Certifications

There is a pretty big gap in terms of the certifications that are available through both companies. That said, ISSA and Precision Nutrition have actually partnered to offer a unique “Nutrition and Fitness Coach Certification” which combines the Level 1 nutrition certification from Precision Nutrition with the Certified Personal Trainer cert from ISSA. 

ISSA

ISSA has a lot of certifications across an array of specialties. They focus primarily on:

1. Certified Personal Trainer
2. Certified Nutritionist
3. Strength and Conditioning Coach
4. Group Fitness Instructor

But you can get any number of specializations beyond those core four to help with your career such as:

1. Glute Specialist
2. Tactical Conditioning Coach for military or law enforcement
3. DNA-Based Fitness Coach
4. Exercise Recovery Specialist
5. Yoga Instructor
6. Powerlifting Instructor
7. Indoor Cycling Instructor
8. Corrective Exercise Specialist
9. Health Coach
10. Running Coach
11. Senior Fitness Instructor
12. Exercise Therapy Certification
13. Fitness Mentor
14. GLP-1 Weight Loss Support Training

Phew! This is a very long list, but the good news is with so many options, you can pick and choose the things that are based on your career. 

In fact, to support this, they have special bundles like the elite trainer bundle or the master trainer bundle that include the core certified personal trainer and nutritionist certifications alongside other specializations, and you can usually pick the specializations that fall under your particular bundle in order to get discounts. 

Precision Nutrition

With Precision Nutrition, the certifications are, you guessed it, based on nutrition. They offer:

1. Precision Nutrition Level 1 (PN1) Nutrition Coaching Certification
2. Precision Nutrition Level 2 (PN2) Master Health Coaching Certification
3. Sleep, Stress Management, and Recovery (SSR) Coaching Certification

So obviously, with this company, your main focus is going to be a nutrition-based certification. The first level of coaching focuses on nutrition science, coaching tools, and habit-based coaching, while the next level up is a different pathway that allows you eligibility to get a National Board Certified Health and Wellness certification.

Beyond this, the SSR option focuses on lifestyle factors that impact overall health beyond nutrition, particularly sleep, stress, and recovery. 

Prerequisites

Before picking any of the available certifications, you need to know what is required of you ahead of time. 

ISSA

ISSA requires a CPR/AED cert for all of their certifications. If you don’t already have one, you can add it to your program for a fee or go get it elsewhere and upload your certification. For this, you need to maintain your certification for CPR/AED/First Aid for the duration of your other ISSA certs. 

For example:

Tina has a CPR/AED card from her previous job, and it expires in 8 months. She completed the ISSA CPT cert, which expires in 2 years. However, in 8 months, she must get a new CPR/AED cert to maintain her CPT cert. 

Other prerequisites are a high school diploma or GED, and 18 years old. 

Precision Nutrition

Precision Nutrition does not require a CPR/AED cert for the Level 1 certification (PN1). It only requires a high school diploma. 

Cost

On the note of money, let’s see how much the certifications cost and what’s included. 

ISSA

Given the wide array of potential certifications with ISSA, the pricing is equally wide ranging between $600 and $1,000, depending on the package. The nice thing here is that ISSA:

1. Offers rotating promotions and packages, so at any given time, you can find a discount
2. Offers discounts once you complete a certification on a subsequent certification
3. Offers payment plans to make it more affordable, and you only have to make one payment on that plan in order to qualify for completion after meeting all other course requirements

That said, there are some additional costs like the renewal fee and any exam retakes. With the final exam for any of your courses, you have two separate opportunities to pass, but if you don’t, you have to pay a retake fee to try a third (or fourth or fifth) time. 

Precision Nutrition

Level one usually costs around $1,000, and this includes your online materials, final exam, and certificate of completion.

Level two costs around $1,500. If you want to add things like coaching software that costs an additional $100 per month and you can add one-on-one nutrition coaching for an additional fee. 

Study Materials

Given the cost, I think it’s very important to compare the types of study materials you receive.

ISSA

With ISSA, you don’t get any physical textbooks included in your price, but you can add them for an extra fee. Otherwise, certifications typically come with access to a digital textbook which can be downloaded and printed and its entirety, but is also broken up into each of the respective chapters as you move through the guided module.

The online portal makes it easy to move through each of your assignments and your respective study materials for a given week, with things like online reading from different textbook chapters, some exercises, and video content to watch.

Aside from study materials directly related to your certification, you also get access to a lot of support from their online portal in the form of things like exercise-based video content, tutorials, office hours for your certification, recorded sessions if you weren’t there for live sessions for study groups, and social media groups. 

Precision Nutrition

Precision Nutrition typically sends you 3 physical textbooks for the first level, with a workbook and a study guide. Online, they have a lot of study materials like bonus readings, videos, and chapter summaries, as well as “try it now” exercises. These are all broken down into the three basic units for each certification. 

I think it’s important to note that each chapter online only requires that you complete a chapter exam at the end and take the final exam. You are not actually required to read or complete the bonus reading, case studies, videos, or other online materials. 

Teaching Methods

Relatedly, I wanted to explore their respective teaching methods. 

ISSA

ISSA didn’t use particularly impressive teaching methods. The video content, though interesting and educational, didn’t really tie back to anything that was directly mentioned in the respective chapters, so it almost seemed out of place, jarring, and clunky. 

There were many chapters in the second section that didn’t make good use of models like illustrations, metaphors, representations, charts, or diagrams to break down complex or otherwise mundane information into something more absorbable.

Chapters focused on vitamins and minerals, or chapters on supplements, for example, were just lists, a terrible teaching method for real consumption. 

Precision Nutrition

Precision Nutrition is no better here. They have the same type of chapters that effectively break down unending lists of things like vitamins, minerals, hormones, and the like. 

I mean it: just an unending list. 

This has long been shown to be one of the worst teaching methods for long-term learning. Both ISSA and Precision Nutrition should strongly consider converting this material into something more absorbable, like stories, diagrams, timelines. Lists are a waste of everyone’s time and, more importantly, money.

Assessments

So how does each company assess your ability to absorb material from each certification?

ISSA

ISSA has things like chapter tests at the end of each chapter as well as a final exam. For some of their certifications and some of their chapter tests, things start off pretty boring, with test material seemingly copied and pasted directly out of the chapter reading, whereas other parts of the chapter tests get very complicated and you really have to think about your answers.

Final exams are pretty thorough, without a timing aspect to most of them, and with the ability to do them online. When you take tests to pass your certification for things like Nutrition Coach, you have to come up with complex answers based on real-life examples, so they basically present you with a fake client profile, and from there, you are tested on several aspects relating to your ability to coach that particular fake client. 

Precision Nutrition

Precision Nutrition gives you the workbook and study guide, the case studies, and the 10 multiple-choice questions per chapter, as well as the final exam.

Much like ISSA, in some of the beginning units, the chapter test question seems pretty linear, matching up with the content in the workbook, but after that, things get a little bit more challenging, and you are often asked about topics that relate to the study material but may not have been directly covered.

The case studies provide very good exercises, basically the same thing you get with the final exam from ISSA’s Certified Nutrition Coach, but for most of the chapters. The downside, though, is you don’t get any feedback, so no one ever reads your answers or tells you what was right versus what was wrong, or if you were completely off base. So it forces you to think critically, but it doesn’t give you that final step in figuring out whether your critical thinking was on point.

Final exams are almost laughable, though, with all the answers basically coming directly from the textbook. Facebook posts have been made in Precision Nutrition groups by people who have finished their certifications in just a few days because of how easy it was. 

Validity

Once you get your certifications, it’s important to know how long they last. 

ISSA

All ISSA certs are valid for 2 years. Once you come up on your expiration date, you can renew by earning a specific number of continuing education units, usually 20. You also have to pay a fee, which is somewhere around $100, depending on the certifications.

However, you can earn your continuing education units through other ISSA courses, and if you do, you don’t have to pay the renewal fee. So basically, if you continue to add a certification from their impressive list every year and a half or so, you can probably meet this requirement with ease. 

Precision Nutrition

The PrecisionNutrition certifications are valid for 2 years, and you have to maintain your certifications by taking a smaller multiple-choice exam every two years. They actually send you an exam online 90 days before your certification expires.

This makes it a lot easier and more affordable to stay certified, but most importantly, it ensures that you at least have some opportunity, no matter how small, to continually test your knowledge of the subject. 

Summing Up

Realistically, Precision Nutrition is much more expensive and significantly more limited. The study materials and the quality of the teaching methods are basically the same between the two, and in most cases, anyone looking to become a certified nutrition coach is bound to want something else under their belt, so the best place to start would be the combination of nutrition coach certification with a certified personal trainer from ISSA. However, the winner for all of the criteria above has to be ISSA.