With marathon and race season right around the corner, getting your legs in shape might be on your mind. But did you know that getting your core strong and functional is actually one of the most important things you can do as a runner? Your core includes muscles quite deep in our bodies close to the center and close to the spine: the abdominals, the pelvic floor muscles, the diaphragm (our primary breathing muscle), and a number of muscles in the back and hips make a 3-dimensional corset to stabilize us from the inside out. When these muscles are strong - and coordinated! - they help to stabilize our trunk, facilitate good and efficient breathing, and provide a foundation on which we can move our limbs. Having a stable and strong core is one of the most important things you can do to prevent injury as a runner. This is because when working from a stable center there is less excessive strain placed onto other joints and muscles in your body.

As summer wraps up and the school season and fall routines begin again it’s a great time to revisit your fitness and health goals. Setting realistic goals is crucial to safely and effectively improving your health. Knowing where you are starting from and what you want to achieve – be it your first 5k run or recovering from an injury to get back to the Tennis courts – helps us to set a path forward to helping create the vision of yourself and your life that you want. With insights from our experienced physical therapy team this guide can help you prioritize your body’s well-being and health at every step on your journey forward.

Discover yoga's poses and mindful approach for shoulder pain relief. Strengthen, stretch, and breathe to enhance mobility.

In the work-from-home era many of us spend a significant portion of our day at a desk, often in a room and setup that was not fully designed to be a full time work station. Over three years after the COVID shutdown I am still working with many of my clients to improve their work from home setups as the effects of poor ergonomics show up over time. Your desk setup can have an profound impact on your comfort, physical health, and productivity. You owe it to your body to listen to the messages it is sending you with pain and fidgeting to establish a better workstation. The range of issues that stem from or are exacerbated by poor work station setups includes: headaches, low back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, eye strain, wrist pain, upper back pain, fatigue, foot and knee pain, hip pain, and more.

Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy is a specialized area of practice within physical therapy that helps to address the health and function of muscles, ligaments, and structures that attach, sit within, or cross the pelvis. Dysfunction of the musculoskeletal structures of the pelvic region can cause or contribute to such diagnoses as pelvic inflammatory disease, stress incontinence, urge incontinence, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic constipation, coccydynia (tailbone pain), diastasis, prolapse, pain with pregnancy, pain with intercourse, vulvodynia, and more. By finding areas of tightness or weakness in the muscles and soft tissue structures of the pelvic floor and addressing these concerns through release of tension, stretching, strengthening, and re-alignment, symptoms of pelvic pain, prolapse, incontinence, pain with sexual function, and more can be successfully managed and treated.

When we begin working with new patients it’s actually quite common for us to hear people say they have been told at some point in their lives that they have scoliosis. But what is scoliosis, how common is it, and how does it affect our bodies?

What is scoliosis and how is it diagnosed?

Scoliosis is an abnormal curvature of the spine. Our spine has three “natural” curves which go forward and backwards: these go in at the neck, out at the upper back, and in again at the low back. These normal curves are named lordosis and kyphosis curvatures. When our bodies grow, notably during puberty, some people develop curves to the right and left. These sideways curves are what defines scoliosis. Because of the intricate nature of how our vertebrae fit together, with each of these right or left curves often comes a rotation, too. The related rotation can cause what is known as a “rib hump”.

The neck (or cervical region) is a balance of flexibility (so we can turn our heads!) and stability (so our heads don’t fall too far back when we look up!).  The saying “that’s a pain in the neck” exists for a reason – pains in our necks really are irritating!

The cervical spine is made up of seven stacked vertebra.  Each one has nerves running through it and out of it sending signals up and down from the brain to the body and back.  

Gait, or the pattern of walking, is extremely important to our physical well-being. Over the course of a lifetime, the average person takes 216 MILLION steps. Gait matters because it’s a repetitive task, when something throws off that pattern it can cause pain and injury that sometimes appears right away or sometimes takes its toll much later down the line. When taking a step, 30+ muscles turn on and off – usually without us having to think too much about them.

It’s impossible to have a good day when it’s a headache day. We get it.

Finding immediate and long term relief can feel impossible at times. We’ve worked with headache sufferers for years

Abnormal posture can cause or be a contributing factor to both chronic and acute pain, especially back pain.