Active Anatomy 25 Ralston Avenue, Belrose, New South Wales 2085

"Merrin has been fantastic. My 3 sons have all had sports injuries over the years and have been treated by Merrin with great results. She also takes the time to engage with the kids to ensure they are understanding of their condition and the rehab required. Highly recommend!"

"I did their "Rehab Solutions Weekend Workshop" in early 2018 which cost close to $900. I was looking forward to learning how to assess my clients and use the assessments to guide my training with them. I spoke with Merrin on the phone prior to the course because I wanted to be sure that I was investing in a quality course that would really make a difference in my client programming. She was very assuring that the quality and content of the course was what I was looking for. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a waste of both money and time. We were taught all of the basic assessments that you might use with a client, most of which any personal trainer or physiotherapist should already know. This is fine, but they taught us almost nothing about what to do with the information we gathered from doing the assessments. I found that far too much time was spend on anatomy. This is something that we, as fitness professionals, should already know. I spent days reviewing my anatomy textbooks in preparation for this course as I wanted to ensure that I was able to keep up with what I expected to be a course on assessing clients and improving their dysfunctions. Of course we were going to cover anatomy, but we went over very basic anatomy concepts which, like I already said, you should already know as a fitness professional. The whole weekend basically went like this: They would do an overview of the body part (again, spending far too much time on anatomy). Next they would describe and demonstrate some assessments for that body part We then practiced the assessment on each other. Then we would move on to the next section/body part/assessment. There was little to no discussion about what the tests meant or how to treat what we found. Now these assessments are available in textbooks as well as all over the internet for free. So it basically felt like I paid $900 for something that I both already knew and could easily find for little to no cost. As an example, we did an assessment to determine if the glute would fire before the lower back or hamstrings would fire. We did the assessment on each other and almost nobody had a proper activation sequence in these muscles. Merrin said that almost everyone you test would have this issue. But that was it. There was zero talk about how to correct this. I mean, a test is only useful if it changes your programming, so what do I do with this information? I have no idea because they didn't teach us. It seemed like most people were there because they had to be so they could get their CEC's. Most didn't seem all that interested in really learning anything. Well I was there to improve my skills, and I left there feeling like I had learned nothing. They gave us the answers to the written tests to save time and make it easier for us, and this was all most people seemed to care about. Merrin rushed through the material, as if she was just ticking off boxes of what she was supposed to cover. For most of the course, it felt like we were just trying to get through slides, without spending enough time to understand any real concepts. This is not what I came to this course for. I can read this information myself, and I had already done so. There are many books with this information in them. But it is difficult to understand how it all fits in when I am starting a new client on an exercise program. I was expecting to learn how to assess people and use the assessments to determine which exercises would be best, which assessments to use in a given situation, how to progress from one exercise to the next, and how to know which progressions were appropriate. After this weekend, I felt no better prepared to help my clients. I learned a few new exercises that I hadn’t seen before. But I’ve already seen most of the assessments and exercises that were taught. My expectation was that I would learn how to use them effectively. I was extremely disappointed with my experience."