Head to Toh Physical Therapy

Head to Toh Physical Therapy I help active adults resolve the root cause of their pain and live the active life they desire.

Are you ready to overcome the pain or injury holding you back from living the active life you want? At Head to Toh Physical Therapy we empower adults in Colorado Springs, CO with the assistance, knowledge, and guidance they need to stay active without wasted time or money.

03/04/2026

The answer might surprise you.

Learned this move from and love it for [secret answer] rehab.

Share your answer in the comments!

Friends and foods in LA ☀️
03/03/2026

Friends and foods in LA ☀️

02/23/2026

My personal lesson lately, I need to chill on basketball a little 😂

I like to train my legs hard in the gym and play basketball with a high degree of effort in a way that pushes and improves my performance.

Doing both of those things well simultaneously is tough!

I of course have the option of backing off leg day which would help, but I don’t want to do that because I know how important it is for keeping me healthy and strong for sport, and I do have goals to increase my strength long term.

But I also find it hard to take it easy on basketball, because it is so fun and my main outlet for stress relief. So it’s tricky.

I almost always advise my clients playing sports that clearly aggravates symptoms to dial back play temporarily while we build resilience in the gym.

Just not doing so great at taking my own advice lately! Because ya know, ball is life.

But my body sure has been letting me know. No real injuries or crazy pain, just what I’d call warning lights 😬

Everyone’s tolerance and recovery is different, but these are important things to think about.

Programming both strength and sport need to work hand in hand. If not kept in check it can quickly get you in hot water.

Anybody else relate??

02/17/2026

Age is a thing. Just don’t let it be everything.

With age comes slower recovery times and less room for training errors, poor nutrition, and poor sleep.

But it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means you have to do it different.

You have to do it smarter.

I find that people fall in one of two camps.

The “I’m too old I can’t do that anymore camp” or the “I’m still 20 in my mind when I’m 60 in real life camp”.

Maybe we could all benefit from swinging somewhere in between those two?

Age is a thing. Everybody knows you don’t perform and recover the same you did when you were 19. So take care of your body and train, but be smart with your training. And don’t be surprised when it doesn’t bounce back and forgive you as easily as it did back in your prime.

But also don’t let it be an excuse. You can still push yourself. You can still build muscle. You can still do athletic things. You just need to be a bit more mindful.

As .dave.strengthandkindness would say, strength and kindness. (Is it ok if I steal your mantra???)

02/10/2026

This has been on my mind a lot lately, both for myself and my clients.

Naturally I see a lot of overuse injuries. What I find with them is often the overuse is related to either their profession or their personality. Both of which are really difficult factors to change!

With a profession a person can often naturally be quite limited in certain tasks they are required to do which can be a challenge to manage.

But then there’s the personality folks. And this includes myself! We love exercise and it gives us stress relief. So much so that we find it hard to stop even when the body gives us clear signals that we should.

So a huge part of recovering from overuse injuries is mental for this reason. It takes some sort of mental and emotional acceptance of temporary rest and modification to activity, and this can be really really hard for some people.

But as with all things I’m huge on education. I’m not gonna just tell you to just rest with no explanation and wish you luck.

Rest is not a long term strategy. But, it can be a very important short term strategy to allow things to recover, so that then you can do the work to build it back up appropriately.

So I explain to people that while rest feels like a regression, most often if you don’t rest; that is the real regression. Not listening to your body only further extends the recovery process. So when I tell you to rest or to modify, it is exactly because I want to get you there as fast as possible!

I reflect on this on a personal level as well. I find that a lot of my own injuries have been related to my own impatience. I want results right away. And I use exercise to manage stress and sometimes that means playing or training too hard when I should be listening to my body.

So that’s why I say, train with Zen. I’m a huge believer in mental health. Get your mind right, get aligned with yourself, confront your demons, journal, talk to close friends, talk to a therapist, and do the emotional work to be mentally well.

Because your head space is going to affect you physically, one way or another.

That is part of what I mean when I say “Head to Toh”.

Much love.

01/29/2026

Flare ups happen. They are a part of the rehab process. We do the best we can to avoid them. But either life or training errors and other things can push things a little farther than we’d like.

Good rehab is about intentionally stressing the body in ways that create positive adaptations. But you push too far and you can land in flare ups zone.

So again dosage of everything. And in this instance dosage was not just increased because of increased weight, and his decision to superset some exercises and do consequent training days because he missed one and was trying to catch up.

Nothing wrong with supersets or consequent training days in certain contexts. But in this context, all of those things combined led to too much of an increase in intensity dosage. So we calibrated and talked about all those things for the plan moving forward.

And yes we dry needled too to help calm down the flare up which immediately decreased pain and improved mobility. So between that and the smart adjustments to his program, I believe we’ll be right back on track.

I want to talk about why this space is important to me in the Head to Toh clinic. It’s related to one of the most common...
01/27/2026

I want to talk about why this space is important to me in the Head to Toh clinic.

It’s related to one of the most common complaints you’ve likely either heard or made yourself about medical appointments: “my doctor didn’t listen to me”.

This sitting area takes up a decent amount of space. I have a treatment table, squat rack, weights, some machines, my desk and some open area.

But with all the equipment I make space for in the clinic, this one has some priority.

And you might think that is strange. But this is where we sit and we talk. It’s where I listen actively to make sure I hear the whole story, and really seek to understand the concerns of my clients.

It’s also where I educate. It’s where I explain what I’m seeing and how I interpret it based on the science and on my experience and critical thinking.

And it’s where we dialogue back and forth to make sure we are on the same page for the plan, making adjustments as we need, and understanding the reasoning behind all decisions.

Do these conversations happen throughout the whole visit and in the whole space? Definitely. But I love that there is a designated space to show intentionality to listen and to discuss.

Because I want my clients to always feel heard so we can provide thorough and personalized care, and because good communication is critical to success in the rehab process.

Does your PT create the space and make the time to really listen to your concerns both at intake and throughout your entire rehab process?

01/22/2026

I’m a huge fan of a regular bent over row in general for back and posterior shoulder strength.

Sometimes I like this variation as the wide angle biases a little less lat and a little more scapular and posterior cuff muscles.

Also I don’t hate that it directly mirrors the position of standard bench press.

I’m not super sold on the 2:1 pull to push ratio theory. While it’s not a bad thing, it’s probably overkill for most. But I do think there can be some merit in pursuing at least a 1:1 ratio, especially if the shoulder gets pi**ed with bench or shoulder press.

It makes some sense to me that the big press muscles like pecs, delts and triceps need a stable “counterforce” from the posterior muscles to push against so to speak. And so developing the posterior shoulder for pressing makes a lot of sense.

And this variation of the wide angle could potentially be more “specific” to the position of bench press.

Quick note on this, you’re probably not going to be able to pull as much with this compared to a traditional bet over row. So start a bit lighter than you normally would with a traditional bent over row.

As always, don’t expect 1 exercise to be a magic for shoulder injuries. This is just illustrating 1 tool I sometimes use, and the reasoning behind it.

If you want a thorough personalized assessment and actionable game plan for your shoulder, let’s chat.

01/20/2026

I could probably harp on this for forever.

Short term strategies are VERY different than long term strategies in rehab, in fact, very often it is the opposite.

You have some acute back pain? Of course, you’re gonna wanna temporarily avoid aggravating activity that is often bending twisting and lifting.

But guess what happens if you avoid those for forever? You’ll lose the ability to do them and only make the problem worse.

If a doctor has told you that just need to rest or avoid activity without giving you a very adequately dosed and progressed intelligent rehab program, please talk to someone else.

They are lying to you. Maybe not on purpose. But that is incompetence, it is lazy, it is borderline malpractice in my opinion.

I’m just glad Some people don’t listen and get second opinions from more informed providers, but I feel really bad for the ones who just take their doctors word for it and the trajectory of the life, fitness, health, and overall joy in life is massively affected. Honestly it’s a shame.

Nooo no my knickers aren’t in a twist again… are they? 😛

01/20/2026

This was a test that Adam from did on me for my last appointment with him for my ankle rehab.

The goal is to get as many lateral single leg hops as you can in 30 seconds across a 40cm gap.

It was a really good test for my ankle dynamic stability and plyometric control. You get not only get objective data by number of reps, but can learn a lot about quality of movement in terms of “bounciness” in the ankle vs hip and knee contribution, overall smoothness and speed of motion, and height of the hops.

This is definitely not done in early stages of ankle Spain rehab. But late phase, it’s a crazy good gut check. Im better at it now but actually still not equal to my uninsured side, so I continue practicing this.

01/19/2026

Overuse injuries can be categorized simply as a joint/muscle/tendon is experiencing more stress or load than it can handle.

This doesn’t always mean the area is weak. It might be quite strong, but is still being overloaded.

So we do strength training not because of weakness, but to increase capacity.

Sometimes weakness can cause pain. But that is not always the case.

01/19/2026

I see patients a lot less frequently than your average PT place

A lot of “standard care PT” is a lot of fluff and wasting your time. If you are coming in multiple times/week doing lot of passive modalities and just doing the same repetitive exercises you could be doing on your own at home, in my opinion, that is a huge waste of time for everybody.

And I don’t like wasting people’s time. And I like to be efficient.

So if you are coming in, we are going to do something productive. And that generally means in a good rehab process, a whole lot less often than average. In visits we are assessing, testing, adjusting and progressing the program, coaching on quality movement, and using hands on care as needed. We don’t sit still, every in person visit we are trying to move the needle forward.

So the average pace I see a person is 2x/month. Sometimes I will start 1x/week especially when pain is acute and intense to calm things down. But as soon as things are stable we go down in frequency. Then on the back end, most often I will back off to 1x/month when we are working on building strength and programming for performance, wellness, and injury prevention.

So on average I see people anywhere from just 6-12 total visits spaced out on average from 3-6 months.

But I am not leaving you on the hook in between visits. There is always an open line of communication between me and my patient to ensure we are staying on track and to answer any questions that come up between in person visits.

Compare that to 2-3x/week for 12 weeks. That can be anywhere from 24-36 visits. If there is a justification for it that you can benefit from that then cool. But I would argue that the vast majority of the time, that is a huge waste of time for everybody involved.

If you want great rehab that is time efficient and effective, let’s chat.

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3650 Rebecca Lane, Suite 8
Colorado Springs, CO
80917

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 6pm
Tuesday 9am - 6pm
Wednesday 9am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

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