Name- Luke Kelly
Age- 28
Town- Oxfordshire

I have worked as a Personal Trainer on and off during and after my degree in Sport Science
along with 2 years as a Duty Manger at a University Sports Centre.

I have worked in gyms since my teens and had always be into sports particularly Rugby. In the second year of my degree I picked up ‘Essentials of Strength and Conditioning’ (the NSCA’score text book) at my University library to help me and my training partner at the time train more effectively for our University Rugby team. This lead to me basing my third year dissertation on a Strength and Conditioning subject, and the rest is history I guess?

I was struggling to get any internships or paid Strength and Conditioning work, I needed to do something that would give my career development a real intense boost! The Sport981 iSCC-LIVE was exactly what I needed! Not only did it provide me with an recognised educational base for Sports specific training with in depth functional anatomy (injury prevention is a tough area to get sound information on and Sport981’s NASM courses are a fantastic base for this), but the fact that you do all this while actually coaching and gaining work experience, makes this a standalone course and a vital starting point for anyone coming out of university and looking for that next step!

The Sport981 team push you very quickly to coach and lead sessions from day one and are always there to help you improve your skills. The coaching assessments we did every term where one of the things I found most useful, I got honest advice on where my coaching needed work and this helped me improve my key skills and confidence very quickly! The weekly workshops also aided in the speed in which you learn the course materials. You are able to ask questions on the subject matter and apply it practically every week! I personally found the whole experience a lot of fun too! You build some good relationships with the team and your course mates.

 I immediately picked up an internship for Northampton Saints Rugby and soon started working as part of the paid backroom staff. At Saints Rugby, injury prevention is vitally important, this allowed me to bring something to the table in terms of what I have learned at Sport981. If you want to make that step into mainstream professional sports I advise anyone to work on building your CV and expertese through a professional internship that will help you to stand out from the crowd and give invaluable contacts for your future career. With that in mind, a course like the ISCC-LIVE is exactly the kind of work that can do this for you. I now work at Leicester City FC under the lead S&C, where i support senior and reserve player training and Academy development.

Strength and Conditioning is a tough career to get into, you will get some dead ends from time to time but stickwith it.

A big thank you to the team at Sport981 for helping me find my break, cheers guys!