ACE Approved Online Courses (sorted by prices) for Continuing Education

According to my math, the average ACE approved online personal trainer course is $28.70 per credit hour.  Considering you need 20 hours to renew your certification, you may be looking at an investment of nearly $600 worth of courses every two years just stay in good standing, and that’s just the average cost (doesn’t even include renewal and CPR fees).

If you’re like me, and all you care about is renewing as cheaply and as quickly as possible, then I think you’ll like my little tool (hehe) below.  Use this interactive table to find the cheapest ACE approved online courses for CECs.

Jump to content below:

• How To Use the Table to Find a Course
• Important Info About ACE Renewal and These Data
• My Recommendations

How to Use the Table to Find a Course

Every element of the table is interactive, including the following features:

• For those of us primarily interested in value (getting as many credit hours as we can for as cheap as possible), check out the Cost Per Credit indicator.  The table is pre-sorted by this value.  At the time of this publication, it’s possible to meet all of your CEC requirements for less than $30 (not including CPR and renewal fees).
  
• Use the filters above the table to only show minimum and maximum values for Cost Per Credit, ACE Credits, Total Course Cost.
  • Example: if you’re only interested in viewing courses that fulfill at least 10 credit hours and cost less than $300, you can set the filters accordingly.
    
  • There are prefilled min/max filters based on the lowest and highest values in the table (e.g., at the moment, the highest ACE Credits offered in a course is 20…unfortunately, I don’t believe these rollover)
• Every entry has a Details/Link button.  Click it to pull up any additional notes on courses (this can be very important for some, as there are a few that derive their course pricing from monthly memberships, as opposed to buying the respective course outright), as well as links to the course info page.
  
  
• Use the search bar if there’s a specific keyword you’re looking for.  The cell content isn’t terribly robust, but course names are typically descriptive, so you can usually find what you’re looking for.  Just remember to clear the search when you’re done if you intend to use the min/max filters (unless you want to continue to filter only on that search term).
  

Important Info About ACE Renewal and These Data

•  While I have no reason to doubt it, I do not guarantee that the data in the table are accurate or even legitimate.  I can only vouch for a couple of these courses from personal experience.  In addition, prices change constantly; these are the prices that I found on their respective sites at the time of my research (10/23).  If you have any questions about these courses, I highly encourage you to contact ACE or the course publisher.  I’m just a dude with an old, nearly derilict website.
• If you’re certified through another personal trainer organization (e.g., NASM, ACSM, etc), I recommend you check and see if the course is also approved for your respective certifying organization.  While researching, I noticed that many of them are; in fact, if this page is well received, I may create a master list for all organizations.
• You currently need the following to renew your ACE certification:
  • 2.0 CEC’s, which translates to roughly 20 credit hours every two years
  • A renewed CPR certification.  I did mine through SMART, an app I bought from ACE, which installed on my phone and let me practice chest compressions using my phone and a cushion (sounds cheesy, but it was actually very well done).  It was $65, but you get .4 credits for completing it (between you and me, it didn’t take four hours…unless it was supposed to, in which case, it totally did).
  • Completion of an ethics course.  This requirement is a recent addition, as of 2023.  Good news though, they offer a free one worth .3 credits (free if you’re already a certified professional/trainer).
  • Once you complete all of the rigmarole above, you have to pay ACE $129 to renew.  Why?  I don’t know why.  I think it’s because they like money.
• As briefly mentioned earlier, I don’t believe you can roll over credits to the following certification period (otherwise I’d do a 200 hour yoga course and be set for the next 20 years).  That being said, it’s not a problem going over.  Just keep in mind, you need to get 2.0 CEU’s total.  An example may be 1.8 credits from a paid course, .3 from the ethics course mentioned above, and .4 from the CPR course.  That adds up to 2.5 credits.  A little overkill, but no one cares.
• All of the courses in the table were listed on ACE’s Approved Courses and Trusted Providers list.  I only included online courses because that’s all I’m personally interested in, and I made this table for myself initially (I’m very selfish).  If you recently completed a course, and it’s not on there:
  • • Doublecheck with ACE because they may have recently added it.
    • You can petition to have it included.

My Recommendations

I recommend you take whatever courses you’re interested in.  For the record, I happily spent $1200 on a course I was interested in a few years ago (CPPS) and I didn’t receive any credit for it at all.

At this point in my career though, I’m really only interested in pragmatically meeting ACE’s requirements as cheaply and as painlessly as possible.  If you share a similar desire, here are my recommendations.  I’ll break it down into two sections below; what I did in order to renew my certification during the last two iterations, then I’ll share what I plan to do for the next cycle.

What I’ve Done the Last Four Years (two renewal cycles)

As mentioned above, you need to complete 2.0 CEU’s (~20 credit hours) every 24 months in order to renew your ACE personal trainer cert.  You also need a renewed CPR certification, as well as completion of an ACE-approved ethics course.  That being said, the ethics course requirement is a recent addition as of this year, and I renewed about a month before it was instituted (read below regarding my plans to satisfy this requirement in the future).

I’ve met my CEU requirements for the last two renewals with MASS Research Review (Monthly Application of Strength Sport).  So far, they’ve kept their course fresh with updates every couple years, in order to satisfy the continuing education requirements of their members (they’re currently on “Quiz #3”).  I really appreciate that they do this.

Here’s a picture of my MASS completion certificate that I took from my fridge (my kids’ report cards are in the trash)

While I could just sign up for MASS every two years, read the course material, take the test, get my credits and cancel my membership, I’ve instead chosen to keep my membership active because I genuinely love their content.  I’m baffled by how they’re able to produce such a “massive” quantity of quality content month after month with the skeleton crew they have on staff…I wish I knew what is in their coffee pot.  And yes, I get paid to say that (kind of…I’m also a member of their affiliate program), but I’d endorse them regardless.

I’ve already reviewed their service extensively (it’s an old review, but it still holds up), and I wrote an article on how to sign up for their “Quiz” as well (I did this because they don’t really do a good job promoting their own course, and it’s almost hidden on their site), so I won’t go into much more detail.  I’ll just say that for $29/month, 1.8 CEU’s, and an open book test that you can retake as many times as you need to, MASS arguably offers the most value of any service I have on the list.

After completing my MASS test, I was still .2 credits and a CPR cert short of the ACE renewal requirements.  I killed two birds with one stone by purchasing the SMART app for $65 from ACE (.4 credits), which satisfied both remaining checkboxes.

Bonus: if this sounds like a good plan to you, but you don’t need the SMART CPR credits (maybe you get CPR training for free in your community, but they aren’t an “ACE approved provider”, and you’re still a couple units shy), you could fill in the blanks with one of the free courses listed in the table above (namely the free ethics course, since you now need that requirement anyway).

What I Plan to Do Next Time I Renew

I don’t have to think about renewing again for at least a year, and if MASS contininues their past trend, and releases Quiz #4, I may just stick with the plan above.

That said, I have a very viable backup option.

I’ll sign up for the Brookbush Institute (the self-proclaimed “Netflix of Human Movement”) and meet all of my requirements through their $19.99/month service.  They currently offer over 150 courses, which you can take in order to qualify for any (or all) of their three accredited personal trainer certifications.  Ironcially, they’re actually accredited through ACE…I don’t actually know if that’s ironic, but I do know that it’s pretty cool.  It’s cool because every one of their courses are also pre-approved by ACE (worth .1-.2 CEUs each), and like I said, there are 150+ to choose from.

Confused?  I was too.  They explain it better than I can here in their membership FAQs. I’m not currently affiliated with them, however, I’m going ask them if they can include me in a referral program as soon as I publish this page. Of all the hundreds of courses I researched over the last few weeks, no other program captures the essence of what I was looking for in terms of value like they do.  At some point, I may just sign up to write a Brookbush Institute review.

If I go this route, I’ll fulfill my ethics requirement with the “Taking Action with ACE” course (free if you’re already an ACE trainer, which you probably are if you’re reading this), and fulfill my CPR requirements with the SMART app I already purchased last go-around (they better let me use it again, or I will throw a childish tantrum).