Twenty years of learning why bodies hurt — and how they heal

I grew up in Australia and studied neuroscience at the Australian National University, because I wanted to know how the brain drives the body. Then I spent twenty years finding out how much of that survives contact with an actual person in actual pain.

Not as much as the textbook implied. I started as an athletic trainer and worked with everyone — elite athletes, and people walking in for the first time six weeks after an operation — and progressed, credential by credential, into what I am now: a pain and performance specialist. Because I kept hitting the same wall from a different angle every time: someone who had been treated. Discharged from PT. Cleared by a surgeon. Adjusted, injected, imaged. Still in pain, still wary of moving, still nowhere near the life they came in wanting.

Nobody had done anything wrong. They had each pulled on one thread of something that turned out to be a web.

That wall is what took me to Cognitive Functional Therapy — the approach validated in the 2023 Lancet RESTORE trial and still holding at the three-year follow-up. CFT treats pain as what the science says it is: a protective output of the nervous system, shaped by load, belief, fear, sleep and stress. Not a readout of tissue damage. Change those inputs in the right order and most persistent pain changes with them.

I combine it with Applied Functional Science — a system that identifies when the symptom and the cause of the pain are in different places, and how to use the whole body to create a different outcome than traditional methods. The knee that hurts is often paying for a hip or an ankle that stopped doing its job; AFS is how we find that, and CFT is how we change it.

The combination is the part that's rare. Most CFT practitioners aren't strength coaches, and most strength coaches have never heard of CFT. I do both, in the same room, in the same hour — calm the system down, then build the body back up, progressively and specifically for what you want back. Nothing gets handed between two providers who never speak to each other.

The studio is at 1800 Glenarm Place in downtown Denver. One-on-one, 45–60 minutes, because that is honestly what the work takes.