When I did something unpleasantly painful to my knee after some serious daily running last spring, my first thought was: Oh! Great! Surgery! My knee is broken and I'm gonna have to get an MRI and that shit is expensive and me and the insurance companies are going to have a great romantic summer together.
That's when I had the good sense to call my uncle, who's a physical therapist in Duluth. He recommended the PTs at this place, and said they were actually athletes and therefore in a perfect position to check out my bustedness to see if it could be cured without knives.
I feel so, so lucky that these women were recommended to me, because they fixed my business.
Laurie is/was my PT, and she's a rockstar. She did an evaluation of my knee, watched my gait, took videos of me running (awk- watching yourself run is akin to listening to your own voice on someone else's answering machine) and came to the conclusion that my knee was busted because I had a twisted pelvis. Guys, when your pelvis is twisted your legs/knees/feet don't work the way they should. Bones hammer on bones and after awhile you end up with exactly the kind of injury I had.
She re-taught me how to walk. She taught my muscles in my core and my legs and my hips to actually work the right way- not the sloppy workaround they patched together because of my twisted hips, but in a way that supported my bones and structure. It made me a better, faster, smarter runner. Do you know how fast you can run when you're powered by your butt instead of your knees? REALLY FAST. And it's totally clear to me that if I had kept on going the way I was going, I was going to end up with a lot more serious injuries down the line in my old-age-i-ness.
I won't lie: this shit took time. It was a couple of months of going there (Mendota Heights is a slog), and nightly exercises for months can be a drag. I also luckily have great insurance so I ended up paying almost nothing for this treatment, which I'm sure would be spendy otherwise. But it fixed my injury in a whole-body, preventative way, and I'm super grateful for it. read more