WHO WE ARE

The Excelsior community

We are made up of clients, colleagues, professionals, old friends, and new acquaintances. We are health-seekers, parents, athletes, retirees, caregivers, rehabilitators, coaches, and students. We are warm, welcoming, and seek to inspire each other to get better every day.

The team behind the work

Excelsior’s practitioners are soft-tissue therapists and strength coaches whose own experiences with injury and illness led us to seek long-term solutions beyond traditional health and fitness models. We specialize in Functional Range Assessment, Release, and Conditioning, and the Internal Strength and Absolute Strength Models. Our work seeks to address the effects and functional consequences of pain, injury, immobility, and movement or structural compensation.

A few years ago I struggled with severe neuropathy in my feet and legs.  I was completely numb from the ankle down and my calves often cramped so tightly I couldn't walk.  None of the doctors I consulted had any relief or even any answers for me.  My condition was a result of months of chemotherapy.  I was thankfully alive, but the quality of my life was severely compromised.  Somewhat out of desperation, I made an appointment with a manual therapist.

By the end of the session I felt my toes for the first time in years.  I cried real tears of joy.  Before I got home I had decided to pursue this knowledge, to learn the techniques and study the body in hopes of being able to help others in the way I had been helped. I can't promise you an experience as transformative as mine, but I'm nearly certain that together we can find you some relief and begin the process of unwinding inhibiting patterns, finding more space and strength in your body.

Before becoming a manual therapist, I spent more than a decade in service work alongside refugees, women on the margins, and struggling families. I moved across roles as varied as mothering youth, graphic design, farming, sports coaching, and advocacy. I was deeply impacted by what I witnessed others endure. Being targeted myself through trafficking, assault, and coercive control left a mark.

For years, I believed being strong meant powering through — until a fluke exposure to an environmental toxin made that no longer possible. I was left facing neurodegenerative autoimmune symptoms: pain and numbness, loss of motor control, and 30 lbs of muscle wasting. Excelsior became part of a last-resort effort to turn my health around.

The clinic and gym became the place I began to redefine strength. No miracles, no hype, no trying to be unbreakable. Just precise joint, motor, and tissue work within a small community striving to be and feel better, from pro athletes to retirees to women like me.

I experienced outcomes I’d been told were impossible—gradual returns of sensation and control that accumulated over time. That process allowed me to return to decades-long goals I’d nearly given up on. Today, my own work here is part of a response to all I’ve lived and witnessed. I care deeply about helping others build both the body and the person within it.