343 | Let us Re-Introduce Ourselves

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Optimal Body Podcast.

[00:00:08] I'm Doc Jen.

[00:00:09] And I'm Dr. Dom.

[00:00:10] And we are doctors of physical therapy, bringing you the body tips and physical therapy pearls

[00:00:13] of wisdom to help you begin to understand your body, relieve your pains and restrictions,

[00:00:18] and answer your questions.

[00:00:19] Along with expert guests, our goal of the Optimal Body Podcast is really to help you

[00:00:24] discover what optimal means within your own body.

[00:00:27] Let's dive in! The way that our foot is supposed to be naturally spread, allowing your toes to have access to full mobility, allowing your foot to be able to pronate and supinate as it needs to in order to be able to build the strength at the bottom of your foot. So if you have not explored this yet, I really encourage you to try out some Vivo barefoot shoes.

[00:01:40] We have a 15% off code only for our podcast listeners that link is down below.

[00:01:44] You can go into our show notes and just click the link in our show notes or just head to now episode. Yeah, pretty wild to know how long we have been doing this. And if you heard our episode from the very beginning of who we are, I think that was episode two that we did it. Yeah, episode two. That we did an introduction. A lot has. Thank you for being here. Right. If you've listened to that one. Yeah, and a lot has changed since then.

[00:03:00] It was funny.

[00:03:01] I was talking with our editor who helps edit some of the podcast stuff.

[00:03:05] Yeah. every single day. One, because it gets us those electrolytes that we need for our body to operate at its most optimal level, but also it tastes delicious. If you haven't had element before, they have so many great flavors like raspberry, citrus, watermelon, and even some chocolate and spicy flavors that can help spice up your day, literally,

[00:04:20] and keep you hydrated.

[00:04:21] Because of the taste,

[00:04:22] I just keep coming back to my bottle of water

[00:04:25] so much more often throughout the day,

[00:04:27] making sure our electrolyte levels Exactly. I wanted to go into when I went into school. I actually thought I wanted to be a choir director. That's the first thing I declared my major for music education. Wanted to be a choir director, loved choir, music, everything throughout all of high school and growing up. And then like a couple of weeks before I went to school, I'm like, I don't want to

[00:05:43] I want to go into music.

[00:05:44] I don't want to study it, do it as a living.

[00:05:46] Like it's a great hobby.

[00:06:47] as people call it. And again, when we say physical therapy mill, we talk about clinics that just churn a lot of people through your, your with the actual physical therapist, person-to-person

[00:06:52] hands-on for 10 to 15 minutes. Otherwise, you're with a tech doing exercises, stuff

[00:06:57] like that, not to say all of those are bad, but you just get not as much one-on-one time

[00:07:04] with the therapist themselves. The thing that that care. So that sold me. And I was like, wow, like yeah, we treat them physically, but we are always there for them emotionally, mentally,

[00:08:22] and can help work through some of those major barriers

[00:08:24] that people have.

[00:08:25] And then that's when I was coaching at, a woman came in and she was giving like anyone who coached could take her Pilates bootcamp and I was the one coach who showed up every single time, even if like none of her clients, she was like, all right, you're

[00:09:42] here. And so she started, I had like one on ones with her. It was amazing. And you would keep track of, you had a therapist or a couple therapists you were with and you were managing all their patients. And so you had a whole list of like, okay, this person has to be out the door by this time. And so you were like, okay, this person's on the table next. This person's on the table next. And meanwhile, you're also going through all of their

[00:11:01] chart of all their exercises.

[00:11:04] You're telling the PTO, this is seeming kind of easy.

[00:11:07] They need to progress, what it is. Insurance just kind of. And what it takes for. Yeah, what it takes for an outpatient clinic like that to be profitable and successful. Yeah.

[00:12:20] There's a lot of underlying issues there. But was hilarious, hot. But that was like, somewhere in California.

[00:13:40] But it was so fun to, like, it was just a random experience

[00:13:43] of like, I heard someone say, oh, they're doing auditions.

[00:13:47] You kind of had to like know someone. That was during PT school. Oh, nice. Was it? Actually, I can't remember. No, maybe that was undergrad still, but I was also coaching Pilates and I was, I don't know. There was always like a lot of stuff going on. So I could only do it for summer, but it was a fun gig for the summer. And also fun facts like, okay, first of all, I never saw myself as a business

[00:15:02] owner ever, ever, ever, like going in PT school, I would say business.

[00:15:06] That's over my head.

[00:15:07] Like I'm going to work for someone. grow was through calisthenics and the calisthenics world and that you competed in the first ever. Oh yeah, I forgot about that fun fact. What was the battle of the bars or something? World calisthenics organization, me and this other girl, Alisa, were the first females, which you look at the females today and calisthenics and they're wild, like beast.

[00:16:21] Me and Alisa would have not been in it, but he was doing surgeries and stuff. And like the second half of our trip, all of the, not all of the hospital staff, but a lot of the hospital staff left because it was all volunteers. And they're like, we don't have anybody to help out in the operating rooms. So me and my older brother, we were 13 and 15 years old,

[00:17:43] got to help in the operating rooms.

[00:17:46] They kind of just started us out by using us as runners, to this volunteer hospital and how grateful they were. We would walk through and do rounds with my dad in the recovery room after surgery and stuff and they would just be so grateful. And I'm standing there like if only you knew 13 years old, I was taller than most of the people in Ecuador still at that point. But like, yeah.

[00:19:00] So that's a pretty crazy thing right there.

[00:19:04] And what else?

[00:19:05] I forget what else I was gonna mention.

[00:19:07] Oh, I mean would love to get back into working with Special Olympics locally in whatever capacity I can. Yeah. So now that we talked about what made us PTs, that was the underlying thing of how we met

[00:20:27] because you're from in an online capacity. And that's very interesting to a lot of the traditional PTs because a lot of it is

[00:21:40] like, how do we reach more people and also make money while we do it so that we

[00:21:44] can have viable businesses.

[00:21:46] Yeah.

[00:21:47] Exactly. I remember I had like seen Dom when we were all standing around for dinner. It's not just all old crusty PTs. Oh, everyone was super nice and everyone was like, no, not old. And, you know, we sat down at the table. You sat at a different table and I kind of noticed like, oh, that guy's cute, but like whatever. And I just sat at the table and was going to have dinner and go back to the hotel room.

[00:23:04] Yeah. And I also like, whoa, it was her mating dance across the room at that. At a PT conference. That was noticed by another one individual. Well, we ended up going to dinner and then afterwards, walking out with a couple of the women who I met.

[00:24:22] We're in Austin, Texas too, by the way.

[00:24:23] I don't think we said that.

[00:24:24] Yeah. We did not see that.

[00:25:25] So like even if it's a piano bar, I was expecting to go in and like we'll start the dance floor move tables to that I will get things started, but it was a bit slow

[00:25:27] It was slow and I was like okay

[00:25:29] I'm about to fall asleep and then someone came up to me and said we're going to a different bar. Do you want to go?

[00:25:34] Yeah, I think Steph was leading the charge. She's just like I feel like it was someone else who said it and I was like

[00:25:40] Yeah, I do want to dance and then I saw you walk out and I was like, okay, let's go

[00:26:49] It's less of a pickup line and more like a hey you look like you need a dance partner or something like that it took him almost on that let me just tell you that almost all night. Oh my goodness.

[00:26:51] A while we finally asked me to dance but it was fun it was like partner dance he was like leading me and it was it was like it was a really fun time and then we ended up walking back talking into like two in the morning stopping out of another bar that was playing.

[00:28:01] like this is cool. She practices similarly to me.

[00:28:04] She has a lot of the similar thoughts and way of thinking

[00:28:07] of people, of our health care system.

[00:28:11] I think it was in that conversation

[00:28:12] that you said something just like,

[00:28:14] oh yeah, we've got so many people that just like

[00:28:16] get together, move together, learn from each other,

[00:28:18] like you should come out.

[00:28:20] And I took that as the invite and in my head

[00:28:23] from that moment, I'm like,

[00:28:24] I guess I'm going out to LA sometime

[00:28:27] in the next few weeks.

[00:29:21] Yeah. All that was all my mind.

[00:29:22] Dance.

[00:29:23] Love dancing with good partners.

[00:29:24] And here's the thing.

[00:29:25] People say there's a lead and a follow and dance.

[00:29:28] And I don't exactly completely agree with that because when I dance with Jen for the

[00:29:34] first time, and this has happened seldom times, and you can just tell when you're dancing

[00:29:39] with somebody who is really good, and and we were both in a place where we were like you know, I came out of a crazy relationship that was also very public and I had to tell him like listen, you know, when he was coming out to LA

[00:31:00] this is a public situation, I'm kind of like unveiling and allowing

[00:31:04] myself to process openly because it's out a couple of weeks later.

[00:33:27] to do, cook. And I said something. I believe this was after the first time I had come out to visit. It might have been before. I don't remember the exact timeline, but I had something

[00:33:32] that was like, I think I met someone. And I think that this is it. And Pete immediately

[00:33:39] turns around and he's like, I think I know who be partners. He's waiting for his PT license to come in was building started to kind of blow up a little bit more. And there's just so many more people looking for a solution.

[00:36:20] I just didn't have the capacity to really do a lot of it.

[00:36:24] And so I remember you like,

[00:36:26] oh, you have like 300 emails.

[00:36:27] Should I go through some of them? I didn't have anyone helping with customer service. I'm like, we need to help. We need to get someone on customer service. We did, but like not like a lot, not like a full time, like me and Mo were kind of doing it, which resulted in 600 unread emails. Well, that was work emails. That wasn't like customer service. That was like, but customer service should screen those.

[00:37:40] Yeah.

[00:37:40] This is where the business.

[00:37:42] Yeah, exactly.

[00:37:44] There were holes.

[00:37:45] Okay.

[00:37:45] Because our customer service person now maintains the Yahoo everything, right? But we had, it was me and like two other contractors that I had at the time. And that was it. And so building a team out and really understanding how it could flow a little bit better, really organizing things on the back end so that everything had structure and a place to be like it was pretty, it was definitely everything that I was missing know, where it's like, I will give you exercise, but who's reading the caption as to why this is important or when this doesn't matter or what, like anti-republic is in a diagnosis. And I want people to understand that. And so being able to create, have a platform where, okay, we can get a little bit more education out there

[00:40:20] from research and our opinions and what we believe

[00:40:23] can really help in a way that can,

[00:40:26] hopefully someone will hear it more It continues to be one of my favorite things that sometimes becomes a bit of a bear because putting out content for a podcast is a lot. Especially these episodes that we do together, finding fresh topics and being able to get up and sometimes we record two or three or four of them in a day and going through all

[00:41:40] four of them and continuing to have that passion and enjoyment doing it together.

[00:41:45] It's one of the places I learn the most though because we read through research on these topics So it wouldn't be anything that ever grew. And so he kind of said, you know, how could, is there a way that we can make this that would actually be something better? Yeah. And that's where we were introduced to, you know, people who really help with building apps and we started to take it on the ground level of saying, okay, if we're going to

[00:43:01] create something new, what would people actually want?

[00:43:04] Yeah.

[00:43:05] And that's where we, from all the feedback that we got, you know, about the optimal body was like,

[00:44:22] this is great.

[00:44:23] The content is great, but sometimes I just don't know what to do.

[00:44:26] Yeah. courses that have come out on the platform to really dive deep into one specific area, like foot and ankle, pelvic floor, there's another strength-based plan, there's the mobility foundations plan that really focuses on self-assessing and then focusing on five different areas that a lot of people tend to have restrictions. So the platform continues to grow. Like Jen said,

[00:46:43] well and help you feel a little bit more connected to us because Jen Health or the Osmo Body Podcast, like we're really doing this for you.

[00:46:48] It's not for us. So we're hoping that we connect more with you so that we can

[00:46:53] build together. And that's ultimately what we want to do.

[00:46:57] And if you do have any questions or topics specifically that you want us to cover...

[00:47:01] Do you feel like we haven't yet? Yeah, we either had done it a long time ago and