Florin
Reviewer
0 helpful votes
A lot of content, but not a great course
I'm rating this as a PT course, not specifically as an online one. If I judged it purely as an online course and set aside the disadvantages that come with that format, it would be closer to 2.5-3 stars. You get a lot for your money on paper: thousands of pages of PDFs and tens of hours of video. It sounds impressive, but I don't think it distills the information all that well. There's very little interactivity, just 10 live group Q&A sessions, which are nice but still leave you feeling like you've mostly bought a very large pile of long-form material. The structure is decent, but spending the entire first half of the course on nutrition without learning almost anything about training starts to get frustrating. It cites a lot of studies and their outcomes, but it often wasn't clear to me how it got from those studies to the recommendations, because it frequently didn't state clearly what it had concluded. It's an online course, so by design there's no real practical learning, and the course does nothing to make up for that, which is odd if the goal is to teach you how to advise people in person. The exercise technique videos are shot from angles that aren't very useful. For the exam they specifically ask you to film your lifts from angles where the form is clearly visible, but they didn't do that in their own course videos, which feels careless. There's also no way to get any feedback on your technique until the exam itself. People asked about this in the Q&As and were told it isn't possible. You're expected to learn how to build a coaching program for a client, and it's part of the exam. But the reference programs in the course vary widely in structure and content, feel disorganized, and didn't give me a clear picture of what a good program looks like from their perspective. The marking and especially the exam feedback feel quite arbitrary for a course that markets itself as science-backed. You get penalized on points that weren't in the listed criteria, which is more confusing than helpful. There's a lot of good information here and you can genuinely learn a lot, and it's nice that you get a certification at the end. But overall I wouldn't recommend it, especially at the price, and particularly if you have an in-person alternative available.
