Three Habits to Build Before Your First EMS Course
From someone who marks the practicals: three things worth practising now that will make your first responder course much easier.
Jarrett Chisholm, ACP · August 29, 2026
Nobody expects you to arrive knowing anything. That is what the course is for, and an instructor who wanted you to turn up already trained would be selling you something odd. But there are three habits that take about ten minutes a week to build, cost nothing, and reliably separate the candidates who look comfortable in a practical from the ones who look like they are being tested.
Image needed · hero
student-counting-pulse-against-a-wristwatch.jpg
Tight overhead shot of two forearms resting on a kitchen table: one person's first two fingers placed on the inside of another person's wrist, and a wristwatch with a clearly visible second hand on the counter's own wrist. Domestic setting, daylight from a window, no uniforms, no clinical props, faces out of frame.
Alt text ready: “Two hands taking a radial pulse at the wrist while the person counting watches the second hand of a wristwatch”
None of the three are clinical. They are the mechanics underneath the clinical work, and they are the things I find myself writing on evaluation sheets over and over again, at every level we run, from a weekend certificate up to a multi-week responder cohort. every level we teach, from a weekend certificate upwards.
You can start all three today, with no equipment and no textbook, on friends and family who have agreed to be practised on. Ask first, and tell them what you are doing. A surprising number of people are happy to be a practice patient for two minutes. Nothing here needs a classroom, which is rather the point: the habits should already be yours by the time somebody is marking them. the Calgary room where the practicals actually happen.
Habit one: count things properly
Find a radial pulse and count it against a watch with a second hand. Not an estimate, not a glance at an app that is counting for you, and not fifteen seconds multiplied by four when the rhythm is uneven. Count it. Write the number down. Do it on several different people, because the difference between a slow athlete and a fast anxious teenager is something you learn by feel rather than by reading a table of normal ranges.
Then count breathing, and count it without announcing that you are doing it. Breathing is the one measurement that changes when the patient knows it is being measured, because it is under voluntary control in a way a pulse is not. The usual method is to finish counting the pulse, keep hold of the wrist, and count the chest rising while the patient still believes you are on the pulse. It is a small deception and it is the standard way it is done.
The reason this matters in a practical is unglamorous. Numbers you invented sound like numbers you invented. An examiner who asks how you arrived at eighteen can tell within a couple of seconds whether you counted or guessed, and once they know one number was guessed, they stop trusting the rest of what you told them.
Habit two: say it out loud
Narrate what you are doing and why, in a normal speaking voice, while you do it. Checking the scene. No hazards. Introducing myself. Asking permission to help. Checking for a response. It feels ridiculous in your own kitchen and it stops feeling ridiculous about four minutes into the first assessed scenario you sit, at which point you will be glad the words are already in your mouth.
It earns its place for three reasons. An examiner can only mark what they can see or hear, so a check you performed silently in your head did not happen as far as the sheet is concerned. Speaking also enforces sequence, because it is oddly difficult to say the steps out of order without hearing that you have. And it settles the people around you: a bystander who can hear a calm voice describing a plan tends to stop arguing and start helping.
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candidate-narrating-during-a-practical-assessment.jpg
Mid shot in a training room: a student caught mid-sentence, mouth open and one hand gesturing towards a scenario patient lying on a mat, while an examiner stands a few feet behind writing on a clipboard and looking at the student rather than the patient. Candid rather than posed, available light, no simulated injuries.
Alt text ready: “A student speaking aloud mid-sentence while kneeling beside a scenario patient, with an examiner writing on a clipboard behind”
Practise it somewhere with no stakes at all. Narrate making coffee if that is what is available, or narrate shovelling the driveway. The habit being built is speech under mild self-consciousness, and where the self-consciousness comes from does not matter to the habit.
Habit three: ask, then stop talking
Most of what you need from a patient comes from what they tell you, and most beginners talk straight over the answer they have just asked for. Practise this: ask one open question, then say nothing for thirty seconds. Let the silence sit there. It is much harder than it sounds, and people fill it with the thing they were not going to mention.
The fault I mark most often is not a missed question. It is a candidate who asked a good question, got two words into the answer, and cut across it with the next question on their mental list. They then built an assessment on those two words. The information was offered and refused, and nobody in the room except the examiner noticed it happen.
One thing is not worth doing yet, and that is pre-learning content. People arrive having memorised drug names or a stack of conditions from the internet, and it rarely helps, because the container to file it in has not been built. Come with hands that can count and a mouth that can wait. If you have not chosen a course yet, start lower than you think you need to. Somebody aiming eventually at a multi-week cohort loses nothing by sitting the forty-hour responder course one step down first, and finds out early whether the work suits them. the forty-hour responder course one step down.
Quick answers
- How do you count a respiratory rate without the patient changing it?
- Keep hold of the wrist after you have finished counting the pulse, and count the chest rising while the patient still believes you are on the pulse. Breathing is under voluntary control, so people alter it as soon as they know it is being watched.
- Should I study before my first first aid course?
- Not really. Memorising conditions or drug names in advance rarely helps, because you have nowhere to file the information yet. Practising the mechanics, counting, narrating and listening, is a far better use of the same hour.
- Why do instructors want you to talk while you work?
- Because an examiner can only mark what they can see or hear, and because saying the steps out loud keeps them in order. It also settles bystanders, who tend to stop arguing once somebody is audibly working to a plan.