Expert Certification Adds Accreditation and Advisory Board

As you probably know, the Primal Blueprint Expert Certification that launched in late August has been extremely well received, and hundreds of students are currently studying to become Primal Blueprint Certified Experts. In fact, we have 74 graduates already, spanning 24 states and 7 countries, and you can read all about them at the Certified Expert Online Directory. While we are pleased to deliver a successful product to an eager audience, I’m also enthusiastic about the bigger picture of having the primal/paleo/ancestral health movement represented in a general sense when it comes to advanced professional education in the areas of diet, exercise, and health science.

It’s a sure bet that progress in mainstream health, fitness, and medical education will happen at a slow pace. As my friend Dr. Doug McGuff says, “Science and mainstream medicine will come around, but it will take 20 years. I’d rather live on the forefront of health progress than wait.” Don’t hold your breath for our hallowed medical schools to start drilling the docs of tomorrow on the pro-inflammatory effects of gluten ingestion, or why the trigs-to-HDL ratio blood values trump total LDL values when trying to assess heart disease risk factors. Registered Dietitians will likely be still studying off the US Government’s beloved ChooseMyPlate for a while longer before they throw the Primal Blueprint Food Pyramid into their course syllabi.

Even the educational tracks of personal training, exercise physiology, chiropractic, and functional medicine can benefit from exposure to the science and practical techniques favored by our (relatively) small and progressive healthy living movement. The cert is turning out to be a wonderful way to make inroads against conventional wisdom, for every hands-on professional that completes the certification program and starts to spread the word to clients and professional peers is changing the world, one small step at a time.

Along those lines, I’m pleased to announce two recent efforts to add legitimacy and credibility to the certification program, through the formation of the Primal Blueprint Expert Certification Advisory Board, and by becoming an accredited continuing education provider with the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM)–an organization considered by many in the fitness game to be the gold standard for personal trainer certification.

Introducing the Cert Advisory Board

Our Advisory Board was created to reflect the support and inspiration offered by an elite group of professionals in the fields of health, wellness, medicine and fitness to the development and ongoing refinement of the program. While you’ll find the work of these folks often referenced in the course material, including direct quotes, I must be clear that they are independent from our company, have no official accountability or byline credit for the course programming, and are not compensated for their service on the Advisory Board. We simply love these folks dearly, greatly respect their work, and have and will continue to follow their efforts closely as thought leaders in the evolutionary health movement. As we expand our continuing education offerings in the future, we anticipate engaging in joint ventures with thought leaders that align with Primal Blueprint principles.

Visit this link to learn more about each member of the Advisory Board. Briefly, here is quick overview of our original members:

Katy Bowman, MS is the red-hot author of Move Your DNA. You’ll get to know Katy in great detail as the launch of Don’t Just Sit There is imminent. This is our joint effort to present a comprehensive multimedia online course to solve the excessive sitting issue in the modern workplace.

Angelo dela Cruz is our PrimalCon superstar (he’s presented at all 9 of them!), a phenomenally talented ninja warrior athlete, respected personal trainer in the San Francisco Bay Area, and wonderous 1:1 healer. The creator of the fantastic Daily VitaMoves website—check it out!

Dr. Rudy Dressendorfer is a longtime professor of exercise physiology now based in Northern California where he terrorizes the 60+ age group crowd in multisport endurance events. He is doing some groundbreaking work to help combat the alarming incidence of swim deaths in triathlon events in recent years. Rudy is the one who proclaimed the course on a par with one of his upper division university courses in the health sciences.

Keris Marsden and Matt Whitmore: The UK’s fittest, most knowledgeable and most engaging couple. Authors of the runaway hit The Paleo Primer (called Fitter Food back in the UK, where it was also a bestseller) and super-energetic PrimalCon presenters.

Denise Minger: Denise’s Death by Food Pyramid is the go-to resource for understanding how we got ourselves into the incredible mess that is the Standard American Diet and flawed conventional wisdom about what is healthy eating. She is an impeccable researcher and prolific writer (check out RawFoodSOS.com), who recently officially joined the Primal Blueprint team as a writer/editor/researcher.

Dr. Cate Shanahan: Y’all know her by now from her regular Primal Blueprint Podcast appearances and also through her unique Primal Advantage 1:1 metabolic consulting program. The pre-eminent MD in the primal/paleo scene, and the personal consultant to the LA Lakers and NBA superstar Kobe Bryant.

Dr. Ronesh Sinha: Author of the South Asian Health Solution, Ron is fighting the battle on the front lines, working with leading San Francisco Bay Area companies and getting people out of high risk heart disease categories with primal aligned diet modification. He is turning lots of heads in the medical community with phenomenal blood reports from patients going about it with diet modification instead of drugs.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: An incredibly dynamic presenter who created the highly acclaimed MobilityWOD website and co-wrote the bestselling book, Becoming a Supple Leopard. Five minutes with this guy will rock your world. Check out one of his viral Voodoo floss videos on YouTube if you have a nagging joint issue.

PB Certification Accreditation with NASM

We are pleased to inform you that the Primal Blueprint Expert Certification program is now an approved provider of continuing education units for the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM). For over 20 years, NASM has provided scientifically validated knowledge in its personal trainer certification programs. Composed of scientists, coaches, researchers, and athletes, NASM as an organization continues to incorporate only the best and most current fitness information and continuing education courses into its personal trainer certification programs. As such, NASM as an organization is considered by most industry professionals as the gold standard for certification in fitness.

After a rigorous review process by NASMs expert panel, the Primal Blueprint Expert Certification program has been approved for 1.9 continuing education units (CEUs) for certified personal trainers achieving licensing through NASM. This is big, considering that NASM certified trainers only need 2.0 units every two years to stay certified. So, if you’re a NASM trainer, upon completion of our course, you’ll have nearly met your entire CEU requirement for two whole years! And even if you’re not a NASM trainer, you’ll have the distinction of achieving a level of knowledge validated by one of the world’s leading organizations for fitness professionals.

Shout Out to the Students!

I must give another plug here for the incredible contribution that our beta-testers and early students have made to the program. We have received a ton of feedback from students, both from formal surveys and informal email communications. This feedback has often come in the form of suggestions to clarify confusing material in the course text, or challenges to examination questions that seem unclear and potentially unfair. We carefully evaluate every morsel of feedback we receive about the course, and absolutely love the ability to make improvements to the course in real time. Believe me, it’s a lot more satisfying than fielding those emails like, “Hey, there’s a typo on page 321 of The Primal Blueprint.” Oops, okay we’ll file that away for our next print run…Anyway, several folks deserve special recognition for the super-enthusiastic and insightful contributions to the coursework editing. First, our beta-testing group (and earliest Certified Experts), who helped get the Cert ready for prime time! They are, in graduation order: Michael Dilandro, Chris Adams, Tina Leaman, Elle Russ, Leslie Klenke, Amy Lucas, and Daniel Rinck.

Students who took the time and energy away from their personal studies to contribute to the greater good of the course (by finding typos here and there, or reminding us when we were US-centric in the commentary, pointing out potential improvements of confusing passages, finding some typos here and there, and by royally busting our chops when they missed questions that seemed unfair and had a legitimate gripe!) include Aldvin Danenberh, DDS, Colleen Conners-Pace, Brian Lamoureux, and Irma Jager.. We also greatly appreciate the interest in the Expert Certification from the folks at Paleo Magazine. Their very own Ashleigh Van Houten took the entire course and graduated as a function of her doing a story on the Cert course. How’s that for participatory journalism! (If you haven’t seen this mag check it out, I’m gonna start doing a regular column in 2015.)

Furthermore, as I indulge my passion for research, communicating with thought leaders in the movement about emerging topics, or evaluating healthy differences of opinion from respected experts, I can revise or update course material accordingly. Our commitment is to have this digital educational experience be easy to understand and progress through, be comprehensive in scope, and always up to date. It’s great fun on our side to present such a dynamic program, and I know the students and graduates would agree that they are having fun investing in themselves and gaining knowledge, clarity and empowerment. If you’ve been thinking about taking things to the next level, with your personal goals and knowledge or with your clients if you are provider, I hope you can join the party here soon! And don’t forget: The introductory price of $795 ends on December 15, so you still have plenty of time to lock in the early bird pricing. But don’t wait too long, the introductory offer will be over before you know it!

You CAN Lose Weight and Get Healthy. Find Out How>>