My Review: Level 1 Precision Nutrition Sleep, Stress and Recovery Coach Certification

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Precision Nutrition. All opinions are mine.

Well, here’s some news … I am officially Level 1 Certified as a Sleep, Stress Management and Recovery Coach with Precision Nutrition and have been since February!

I signed up and started the program back in August of last year, and you can read all about WHY I wanted to go for this certification here.

The quick version includes:

• The subject of sleep, stress management and recovery can and usually is a main factor contributing to people not seeing the results they desire.
• A consistent fitness and nutrition routine will take you far, but it’s not enough for optimal health or results … you also need to prioritize recovery, quality sleep and address stress.
• Most people don’t actually know how to do this effectively.
• We are already subliminally attempting to manage our stress and recovery whether we realize it or not. Our behaviors – no matter what they are – are an attempt to solve a problem, and this can look like anything from taking a yoga class and getting a good night’s sleep to accidentally staying up three hours past your bedtime binge-watching a show while drinking wine.
• Behaviors we turn to can be a direct result of the stress we’re experiencing, and learning proper management and recovery techniques help us form healthy habits for good!

As a fitness and nutrition coach, I sought this certification out as an important and missing piece of the optimal health and wellness puzzle. I see clients, family members and friends skip over their recovery often, and this can absolutely be why they aren’t sticking to their healthy habits long-term, or why they don’t feel as good as they could.

I’ll share a few key takeaways, but a full review of the program is spelled out for you below.

Quick Takeaways

It would be impossible to list all of the learning points I gained throughout this course, so I’ll condense the list to a handful or so tips that hopefully help you in your health journey!

• Stressors are everywhere. The key is not necessarily eliminating stress, but in how you’re *managing* your stress. Your bad/threatening stress responses could turn into productive stress or good/challenging stress responses if they’re done in the right amount and at the right time.
• Ignoring stress and recovery is not the answer. If you’re going to work hard, train hard, parent hard and play hard, you have to learn to acknowledge and manage your stress as well as recover properly.
• In terms of nutrition, sleep and circadian rhythms can powerfully influence huger, appetite and satiety, gastric motility and digestion. On the flipside, nutrition itself can also affect sleep and circadian rhythms. It’s all connected.
• The quality and quantity of our sleep comes from: environmental factors we can change or adapt, our behaviors around sleep, the mindset we have about sleep, and the stress management practices we use to support our sleep.
• Our mental state strongly shapes our sleep, and chronic stress and anxiety are particularly bad culprits. Learning to manage stress effectively (and shifting from threat to challenge) is crucial for our sleep.
• Burnout is a real thing! The phenomenon known as burnout is a full body experience that has roots in all aspects of our deep health: physical, mental, emotional, social, existential, and environmental. The more we ignore or fail to manage our sleep, stress and recovery, the easier it is for us to eventually experience burnout and setbacks.

The Precision Nutrition method embraces a holistic approach to wellness, addressing nutrition, exercise, recovery, stress management, and more. I was pleasantly surprised by how much the program exceeded my expectations, and I am impressed with the tools I gained along the way.

More About The Precision Nutrition Approach

The Precision Nutrition curriculum-style is different than any other program I’ve studied. The necessary information and science is there, but what differentiates PN from other programs is the additional chapters on being a good coach in and outside of health and fitness. In fact, Unit 1 of the course (Chapters 1-5) is dedicated just to the PN Approach and includes chapter topics on your personal learning approach, what makes a great coach, helping people change and defining “deep health.”

The bulk of the program is covered in Units 2 and 3, and focuses on — yup — deep health, sleep, stress management and recovery. But they really take you through a deep dive! (More details below.)

There’s more to say here, but here are the key takeaways of the PN Approach:

• There is less of a focus on the technical terms and more on successful coaching strategies that apply to real people, case studies and real people’s lives.
• The perfect coaching plan does not exist, and there is no one-plan-fits-all.
• Coaching is collaborative, and outcome-based decision making is what gets you success.
• There is importance in mastering fundamentals, circling back to them and understanding and teaching “deep health.”
• Steer away from being perfect, and instead coach clients towards a growth mindset — making small, better-for-you changes every day to create improved choices over time.
• Coaching is not just about workouts and diet plans, it’s about helping people feel the way they want to feel.

More About the SSR Coach Certification

We’ve all heard to get adequate sleep, incorporate self-care, and take recovery days regularly, but do you know WHY and HOW to specifically set yourself up for success in these categories? Or if what you’re doing is ideal and if it’s actually helping you?

If not, this certification could help and will certainly answer these questions.

I personally believe that sleep, stress management and recovery is not talked about enough, and that it is considered to be overrated by most people. But it shouldn’t.

This program offers specific strategies and tools to help manage stress. It covers stress responses, good stress, bad stress, the link between stress and recovery, heart rate variability, finding the stress “sweet spot,” the ideal “recovery zone,” and more.

There are different categories of stress and recovery to address like:

• Physical (movement, injuries, sleep)
• Mental (processing information, prioritizing, decision making)
• Emotional (emotional stressors and responses, processing)
• Social (social dynamics and social threats)
• Existential (exploring your purpose in the world)
• Environmental (8 layers from what’s next to you to across the world)
• Nutritional (metabolic/movement needs, macro/micro nutrients, supplements)
• Movement (muscle and mechanical demands)

… and more. This course walks you through the science behind each topic above along with much more in the sleep category like:

• What defines sleep
• Stages of sleep
• Why we need sleep and why we get sleepy
• Sleep duration, quality and disorders
• Your sleep drive, circadian rhythms, hormones, wakefulness
• Genetics & chronotypes
• Sex, gender, aging and life phases
• Improving and building sleep skills

… and more.

Each Unit walks you through the information, science and relevant case studies. You’ll participate in real-time client conversations in the form of an interactive video stimulation where you chat with a “client” who shares their story and choose the path of conversation based on what coaching strategy you think is best. If it’s not the ideal scenario, you’re encouraged to start over and choose different answers to see how the conversations and coaching sessions unfold. It really puts the study material into practice!

Pros and Cons

There are pros and cons to everything, so here is a compiled list of mine on this certification.

Cons

• Fully digital textbook format. I do appreciate having all of the information online and at my fingertips at any moment, but the Millennial in me (ha) craves a physical book to highlight in front of me. This could be a total pro on someone’s list, but that’s my personal preference.
• Fully digital study and workbook. Just like the above point, I prefer to write things rather than copy/paste. I just retain information easier that way. I appreciate the digital format, but for me … this is more of a con than a pro for my personal learning experience. (Too many tabs open at once!)
• Your own timeline. There is no expiration date on course completion. This could be a plus for some, but I am the type of person who needs at least a rough deadline to finish anything. Not having that pressure was a challenge for me, and I ended up setting my own deadline(s) to complete the course. Again, this is my preference and how I work best.

Pros

• The content. I really loved this course. The subject matter was wonderful! It was also entertaining and written with personality behind it. The videos were extremely helpful and even funny! This kept me engaged and motivated to keep learning.
• No extra fees, no waiting. Unlike tuition with extra fees at the bookstore in college, all of the materials you need to complete the course are included in the upfront cost. You can begin the course immediately after purchasing, and you’ll get your certificates immediately upon course completion via e-mail.
• Real-life scenarios. I enjoyed the case studies at the end of the chapters. They take you through actual Precision Nutrition clients and coaches stories and show you how to apply the PN approach step-by-step. Then, they ask you to respond to questions about the case study or similar scenarios. It was a great way to learn.
• Learner’s Manual. All of your answers to the case studies are recorded in the Learner’s Manual. You can visit this page whenever you want to revisit your goals, motivations, and secrets to success that you applied.
• Bookmarks + Highlights. Along with the Learner’s Manual, you can bookmark as much as you’d like by highlighting and saving it. You can even add a little note to each one. Then, you can go back and access all of your bookmarks and highlights throughout the chapters. This helped me review the material from previous chapters easily and reference terms and relevant information on the exams.
• Access to digital assets, forms, assessments, etc. Precision Nutrition has a resource center that can be invaluable to your business, especially early on. You’ll have access to client assessment worksheets, questionnaires, links to other coaching tools, nutrition calculators, nutrition guides, PN infographics and more.
• Access to exclusive Facebook Groups. You’ll have access to the PN Level 1 Certification students group during your studies and then access to the PN Level 1 Certification graduates group after you’re certified. Here, you can ask questions to your peers, search the discussion threads and find additional resources like more coaching tips, case studies, challenges, helpful content around ProCoach, exclusive webinars and more.
• ProCoach. This is PN’s own nutrition coaching software, which you have free access to for 90 days. I haven’t tried this out yet, but I will definitely log in and do so very soon. With this, you can essentially start coaching clients immediately.
• Next Steps. This certification includes a chapter to help you decide what’s next for your coaching practice. It gives you a variety of options (along with the pros and cons of each format), tips on how to attract clients, and asks for three pages of answers in reflection to how you’re going to take this knowledge and apply it to your business. I think this tool is incredibly helpful!
• Continuing Education Credits. As a NASM Certified Personal Trainer, I need CEUs to be able to renew my certificate every two years. This program awarded me 1.9 credits, which is all I need outside of renewing my CPR/AED certification.
• 45-day return policy. If you start the course and decide it’s not what you’re looking for, you can get your money back within 45 days.

My Overall Review

As you probably gathered from the uneven pros to cons list above, I really enjoyed this course and the experience of another Precision Nutrition program. The material was equally as entertaining as it was informative, and I appreciated that the entire way through.

I understand the need to go fully digital, and it is helpful to have all of the course material and study workbooks online to access at any time. That said, part of me wishes the content was broken up into some textbook material, or a combination of the two based on your preference. (I think the option to pick if you want your Study Guide and Learner’s Manual available in textbook or digital format would be amazing!)

Overall, I am very pleased by the program and feel confident in my coaching skills within my scope of practice in helping with stress management, sleep, recovery and making sure it all works together in a nutrition and fitness plan.

I am impressed by the science-based approach. Precision Nutrition does their research, and I love how the study material changes across the years. They test clients and certification students/graduates and pick their brains to be able to gain feedback, improve and include some of those changes in the case studies and study materials.

If nothing else, this program has engrained the progress over perfection mindset in myself and as a coach, which is a huge skill to accomplish and stick to. Precision Nutrition focuses on the growth mindset and commits to behavior over outcome strategies. Results are great, but I love how this and similar PN programs take you beyond the results to instilling long-term healthy habits as the end goal.

I also really love how achieving optimal deep health is always number one – physical, emotional, environmental, mental, existential and relational all together.

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Thanks for taking the time to read my review!

Feel free to get in touch if there’s anything else you’d like to know.

Here’s to exciting new journeys on the horizon!

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Disclaimer: After choosing to go for the Sleep, Stress Management and Recovery Certification, I reached out to the company and offered to share my experience in exchange for access to the program. I am very grateful for this partnership! As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own on this and any future posts.