Excelsior specializes in Manual Therapy, Functional Strength, & Joint Mobility

We are teachers, coaches, and trainers who are also skilled at manual therapy. The consult room and clinic table are not the end of the story, but only the beginning.  Garden variety therapy, rehab, and strength training are very often not specific enough. Banded “clam shell” exercises don't segment the spine; back squats don't build strong hips, they require strong hips; foam rolling doesn’t increase mechanical or neurological control. And so on.

Whether you’re an office manager, mother or grandmother, or high-performance athlete— if you don't have the requisite range of motion for the movement patterns that are important to you, just doing more of those patterns isn't helping, it's hurting. Patterns wear out. We teach you how to train the joints, tissues, and controlling neurology that keeps pain, injury, and compensation at bay when you do whatever it is you do in life or in sport.

Getting up off the floor, running a mile, or doing a back squat are all external displays of internal capacity in: JOINTS, MUSCLES, TENDONS, LIGAMENTS, FASCIA, and the CONTROLLING NEUROLOGY. Aberrant function in any of these ecologies will lead to: training plateaus, joint deterioration, sub-optimal movement compensation, and eventually pain and injury.

Our work helps you simplify, understand, and manage these internal conditions through a spectrum of clinical ASSESSMENT, soft tissue TREATMENT, and joint-based individualized strength TRAINING scalable from rehabilitation to maintenance to conditioning. But the glue that holds our work together is EDUCATION. The more YOU — the client, the patient, the rehabilitator, the retiree, the athlete — can come to understand your own body and how it functions, the more tools you have to help yourself when working toward long term strength, freedom from pain and immobility, and buffer against injury.

Guided by anatomy, physiology, exercise science, the research of Functional Range Systems®, and other bodywork modalities, the clinic and gym are a classroom and we are lifelong learners.

A S S E S S 

We use objective assessments to measure your articular capacity in all articular spaces. Where can you move? Where can’t you move? How do you compensate? Do your joints have enough workspace? Is your active range adequate to your passive range? Does your connective tissue restrict articulation or force absorption? What afferent or efferent signals are present? These assessments pair with your report of symptoms and goals, and help us determine the appropriate treatment or training inputs possible to help you move more and better.

T R E A T 

On the clinic table, we address deficiencies and restrictions with hands-on and movement-based inputs. We palpate and apply manual pressure to muscle, bone and connective tissue, while giving you cues to move, contract, relax and hold isometrically.  In this way, we help you resolve mechanical and neurological impediments to articular freedom. Each session addresses work space in the joint and tension in the surrounding tissue, as well as your motor control which integrates these functions. You are an active participant. While the work can be intense, most clients leave feeling relief and/or progress, and with an abundance of new information about their body. The principles we use on the therapy table are the basis of all the work that we do, from intervention to training.

T R A I N

Time in our clinic, manually addressing deficiencies and restrictions, provides you a moment to begin cultivating the internal environment for more and better pain-free movement. But it is only a beginning. Complete healing and full function require patience and relentlessness. They require constant stimulus and progressive overload.  In a word, they require training– at any age, ability or capacity. Training is how we get more from our joints and tissues: in sport, in life and in our quotidian habits and postures.  Without training we plateau, compensate and get injured.  Excelsior uses individual and class-based coaching sessions to teach you to preserve the changes we make in the clinic, and to train for articular function, motor control, and a buffer against injury. 

Talk with a practitioner before you commit.

Come in for a functional assessment. Discuss the work and potential treatment options. No charge. No pressure. Just more data to help you make an informed decision.