Exercise Physiology in Rose Bay, Sydney
If you’re after an Accredited Exercise Physiologist in the Eastern Suburbs, Dr Gavin Gordon offers university-trained Exercise Physiology for chronic health conditions, injuries and rehabilitation from our Rose Bay clinic. We’re a Medicare and NDIS registered provider.
What an Exercise Physiologist actually does
Accredited Exercise Physiologists are allied health professionals who use exercise as a treatment. The training is a four-year university degree with clinical placement hours, and the scope is medical: chronic disease, post-surgical rehabilitation, persistent pain, neurological and cardiovascular conditions, injury. Dr Gordon holds ESSA accreditation and combines Exercise Physiology with Gonstead Chiropractic care, which is an uncommon pairing in Sydney. Sessions may be covered by Medicare, private health insurance or NDIS funding depending on your circumstances.
Your first session, step by step
Nothing gets prescribed before something gets measured.
We start with the history and with what you want back. Not a vague goal. Something concrete: get through a shift without the back seizing, carry the shopping up from the garage, get back on the bike to Watsons Bay, sleep through the night. Then I assess. That means watching you move through the patterns that matter for your situation, a hip hinge, a squat, a step-down, a push and a carry, along with joint range of motion, relevant strength testing, and balance work if falls risk is part of the picture. For people managing cardiovascular or metabolic conditions we’ll take resting measures and use submaximal effort rather than pushing hard on day one.
You leave with a written program. Exercises, sets, reps, loads, how often, and the rule for when to progress. Most people do the bulk of it on their own between visits and come back for review and reassessment, generally every few weeks early on and less often after that.
What a real program looks like
Take a common one: a forty-something who has just come out the other side of a bad lower back flare-up, second episode in three years, works at a desk, sits in traffic on New South Head Road twice a day.
The first two weeks are boring on purpose. Walking, built up in intervals rather than one long punishing effort. Basic control work so the lumbar spine stays out of end range while the tissue calms down, along with hip mobility, because tight hips make the back do work it wasn’t built for. From about week three we start loading: glute bridges progressing to single leg, split squats, a hip hinge pattern taught with a dowel before it goes anywhere near a kettlebell. By week six to eight, loaded carries, step-ups and a deadlift pattern scaled to whatever they can hold well. Somewhere around week ten it stops being rehab and starts being a strength program, and that’s the point.
Osteoarthritic knees run a similar arc with different content: quadriceps and hip strength, sit-to-stands, cycling for range and circulation, and load introduced gradually rather than avoided. Here’s the opinion, and it isn’t universally popular. Rest is the worst long-term prescription for an arthritic knee. Cartilage and the muscle around the joint respond to load, and the people who do best are the ones who train the leg, not the ones who protect it.
How this differs from a physio or a gym program
Good physiotherapists and good exercise physiologists overlap plenty, and I refer to physios regularly. Broadly, physiotherapy leans towards acute injury management and hands-on treatment, while Exercise Physiology lives in the longer arc: months of progressive loading, chronic conditions, and the part where you have to get genuinely stronger rather than just less sore.
A personal trainer is a different thing again. Plenty of trainers are excellent at what they do, but the qualification doesn’t cover post-surgical protocols, type 2 diabetes, cardiac rehabilitation or a lumbar disc six weeks post-injury, and it doesn’t need to. If you’re healthy and want to get fit, hire a trainer. If there’s a diagnosis in the mix, that’s what we’re for.
Medicare, NDIS and private health
Eligible patients can access Exercise Physiology through a GP Chronic Condition Management plan, which you might still hear called an EPC or a care plan. That entitles you to up to five Medicare-subsidised allied health services per calendar year, shared across all allied health providers you see. Your GP decides eligibility and writes the referral.
Being straight about it: five sessions won’t rehabilitate a chronic condition. What they will do is get you assessed, get a proper program written and taught, and get you reviewed once or twice while you do the work. That’s a reasonable use of them, and it’s how I structure care for care plan patients rather than burning all five in the first month.
NDIS participants can use funding where goals include improved functional capacity, mobility, pain management or chronic condition management. Private health rebates apply on many extras policies. Ask us before you book if you want the numbers clarified.
Booking
Gordon Chiropractic and Exercise Physiology, 2/529 Old South Head Road, Rose Bay NSW 2029, serving Bondi, Vaucluse, Double Bay and the surrounding Eastern Suburbs. Phone (02) 9371 7774 or book online. If you’ve got a referral, bring it. If you’re not sure whether you qualify for one, come in anyway and we’ll talk it through.
Exercise Physiology Services Near You
Serving exercise physiology patients from Rose Bay, Bondi, Bondi Beach, Double Bay, Paddington, Woollahra, Edgecliff, Vaucluse, Bellevue Hill, Darling Point, Watsons Bay, and across the Sydney Eastern Suburbs. Contact us to find out how we can help.