Your body is holding you back from
living your life.
You feel stuck when it comes to your health and fitness goals because you feel like you’ve lost your mobility, strength, and power. Your days are interrupted and overloaded with your annoying pain, strain, or soreness.
You’ve noticed more tightness, clicking, and discomfort with normal day-to-day activities.
You’ve even tried a standing desk, returned to yoga, and seen your massage therapist on a regular basis.
Like you, I’ve experienced pain, injuries, and setbacks along with the overwhelm of not knowing what to do and when to do it.
This doesn’t have to be your reality.
I created Motion Therapy to help action-takers learn how to relieve their own pain.
By working with clients one-on-one in their daily life, I have a deep appreciation for the roadblocks that get in the way.
You might be thinking: “Heidi, well, as a doctor of physical therapy, you know exactly what to do.”
Here’s the truth, when you are in pain you need support, direction, and guidance to help you get results quickly because somehow the things you know you should do (your common senses) seem to go out the door.
I can help you:
- Relieve your pain immediately
- Diagnose the underlying cause of your problem
- Learn how to manage your body imbalances complicating your pain
- Implement strategies, techniques, and tools that you can perform anywhere and anytime to get lasting results
- Stay accountable to your active lifestyle by systematizing your body maintenance with a customized 10-Minute Body Maintenance System
There are shortcuts and I want to show you them so that you can live pain-free and injury-free.
About Heidi
Heidi Roberts received her Doctorate of Physical Therapy degree from Loma Linda University in Southern California. After graduation, Heidi realized she was missing critical clinical experience. So, different from most PTs, she pursued an Orthopaedic Physical Therapy Residency with the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) in Seattle, Washington. This unique experience allowed her to jumpstart her career, skip the trial and error, and gain high-level critical thinking and treatment skills.
What does this mean for her clients? Heidi has developed an integrative treatment approach that is effective, efficient, and results-oriented. The transformative nature of working with Heidi draws a broad spectrum of high-level achievers from the professional athlete to the ambitious entrepreneur.
Early on, Heidi recognized a tremendous lack of body-awareness as an underlying cause of people’s pain. She desired to teach what she had learned and help others on their health and wellness journey. Instead of working with people in hospitals and clinics, which required simulation of their life …training, working, and playing…Heidi promoted pain and injury prevention through a proactive approach to overall health and wellness. By teaching clients how to manage their own aches and pains in their day-to-day environment, Heidi’s clients avoided costly and time-consuming injuries.
So, in 2012, she founded Motion Therapy, which enabled her to bring physical therapy, injury prevention, and wellness services to athletes, small business owners, and entrepreneurs in their everyday environments. In addition to working 1:1 with clients, Heidi has also created on-site injury prevention and wellness programs for large corporations as well as small businesses.
Why I Do What I Do
When I was fresh out of college, I landed a prestigious job working for General Electric’s (GE) financial management program.
It was exciting and scoring such a highly esteemed gig took a ton of focus, hard work, and persistence. However, the job itself was an enormous responsibility and somewhat intimidating in that regard. So to cope some of the nerves I had around this, I called upon a saying my dad had taught me and that I’d applied to other challenges over the years: Good, Better, Best. Never let them rest until good is better…and better is your best. I felt that if I worked hard enough I could accomplish most anything and that’s the very mindset and work ethic I used when charging into this new career.
However, I quickly lost the “skip” in my morning step.
Within a short time, the thrill in this opportunity was totally gone. I was miserable—and I got sick. My body was telling me it was in a state of dis-ease, certainly not meant to sit at a desk job 10+ hours a day. Years later, I’d learn this was symptomatic of Sitting Disease, which, in short, is a state of disease from sitting too much, whether physical, mental, emotional, or any combination thereof. Although GE challenged my mind, I was feeling sedentary and diseased in body and spirit.
Without a doubt, my first job drove me toward the mental, physical, and emotional growth opportunities we all face on the journey of self-discovery.
But fortunately, my experience at GE also gave me other insights on fostering creativity, navigating ambiguity, taking risks, developing new-world skills, empowering teams, and unleashing passion. While these were all great lessons, I wasn’t aware of their purpose just yet. It was like what Steve Jobs talked about in his famous commencement speech when he said:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, Karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path.”
Trusting in what I’d later realize were my “dots,”
I quit the job and retooled for a career in the medical field, hoping it would offer me the autonomy, knowledge, and skills to change people’s lives, including my own. On this new path, I attended Loma Linda University for Physical Therapy. There, I started learning about the human body so I could help myself first and then others on the journey to greater health and wellness.
To me, the notion of teaching what we learn simply made sense. Yet after graduating, completing my post-doctorate residency, and gaining diverse experience at private practices and hospitals in the Pacific Northwest, I got a serious dose of reality. I realized that the medical model was very similar to the corporate model that I thought I had left in my former career. Worse, the industry I’d chosen was one that thrived off a reactive versus a proactive approach to health and wellness.
Full of frustration and disappointment…
…I started to question whether all my education around treating the “whole person” really mattered. Sure I got that rehabbing and fixing the body after injury, post surgery, and for chronic pain was part of the spectrum of treatment. But if the system didn’t care about prevention and educating the whole person about proactive mind-body-spirit maintenance, how could I provide holistic care that was effective, efficient, and sustainable?
Eventually, my job felt pointless. I was burned out.
Stuck in the system and exhausted by the bureaucracy, politics, and reactive medical model, I got sick again—this time was more serious. Shingles.
Sores broke out on the left side of my neck and shoulder. It increasingly hurt to perform daily activities, my pain intensified, and shingles literally stopped me in my tracks. I stayed home from work, distanced myself from my friends, and, feeling like a failure, sunk into depression.
With time and space to reflect, things in my mind began to shift.
Knowing that my work ethic and forward movement had gotten me through many mental and physical challenges in my past, I started to connect those early “dots.” Getting into motion had always been my number-one tool for driving change and I realized it was time yet again to redirect my energy and momentum.
However, first I had to get clear about my values.
I had to think about what I wanted to do with my life and create a powerful vision. Most importantly I had to do some serious self-study and define how I wanted to feel in my life despite the undesirable circumstances. In addition, I had to create momentum around a new life and business model, a new mindset, and a new way of living. Choosing to take daily action—making this forward movement with my mind, body, and spirit—literally relieved my pain.
Here’s what that movement looked like for me:
For starters, I believed in my TRUTH…I was someone who could listen to and help others understand, work through, and find lasting solutions to pain. And I also believed in my MISSION…which is to optimize people’s quality of life through an integrative and proactive approach to body maintenance. What’s more, I had created a VISION…optimal health and wellness informed and inspired by lifelong learning and adventure. The key was to just get people moving, myself included.
And so I did. With intense focus, drive, and renewed energy for my life and business…
I got back into a habit of motion, specifically through hours, weeks, and months of daily yoga, mindful movement, and learning how to create and build a business and lifestyle that served myself so I could wholeheartedly serve others. I also shifted my perspective, recognizing that my sicknesses and disease were opportunities to follow my intuition, practice courage, and like Steve Jobs said, build the “confidence to follow my heart even when it leads me off the well-worn path.”
Why do I share this personal story with you? Because during my journey, I created a “Roadmap To Recovery” and the process that I now share with clients, the world, and maybe you. If it’s time for a change and you’re looking for a real and lasting transformation in your life, I’d love to chat and help you or your team create your own personalized recovery roadmap.
