Orlando Movement Practice Origins - How A Night in the ER Led To Better Helping You Receive the Care You Deserve

Orlando Physical Therapy and Movement Training done differently…​

Every day I’m eternally grateful to go to work, knowing I get to work with ideal clients who are active and care about their health.

It wasn’t always that way though…

If you have a few moments to get to know me a bit better, I’d love to share why I started Orlando Movement Practice as well as how I developed my approach to movement development and whole body restoration.

The Night I Felt Like I Was Dying

I remember that November night vividly... It was brutal. So brutal, in fact, that I ended up in the emergency room…

I had been ripped out of my sleep around 11pm with distinct symptoms of feeling like I was having a heart attack…pain in the left side of my chest that radiated down my left arm and a bit into my jaw, my heart beating furiously…

I was flush and could barely catch a breath. Even though I knew techniques to find calm in stressful scenarios, I could not control these feelings and was spiraling out of control.

My wife tried to ease my worry, but we decided to head to the emergency room and after 4 hours of tests, the results?

Stress.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I thought to myself. How embarrassing. How did I let myself get to this point?

My Background Story

When I started my career as a physical therapist, I worked for one of the large hospital systems with clinics all over the place seeing upwards of 20 patients each day. In a few short years I had accumulated a few thousand patient care hours across multiple age groups, ethnicities, conditions, and starting levels from sedentary couch potatoes to elite level athletes.

I was accustomed to adapting to high stress scenarios though, so I thought nothing of it for awhile, until my body started showing signs that things were not all right.

See, my whole life I have been a survivor. Several tough experiences growing up led to constant low levels of anxiety and I was good at hiding it. No one would've known.

Couple that with an extremely technical mind, a really genuine desire to help people with my skillset, and unrelenting demands for productivity instead patient care, and it was a crash waiting to happen.

Our Healthcare System Is Broken and Failing Everyone Involved

In my job I had to make a daily decision to sacrifice myself or the quality of care of my patients and I fell on the sword nine times out of ten. I had seen so many PTs become complacent and burnt out because of this system, but I was determined not to let that be me.

After a few years, I was spending up to 3 hours each night catching up on paperwork because I made the choice to hone my craft and help my patients over getting home at a decent hour.

My life was minimized and that became unsustainable. After that scare with my heart, I had to get out.

I was tired of it all, so I broke away…

My Biggest Influences In Movement

Over time, my unique approach to human movement development and restoration emerged out of engaging in endless hours of continuous personal research outside of my formal doctoral level education to merge ancient wisdom with current findings in the literature. On top of that, I was working through an extensive personal injury list myself, trying to apply the things I was learning to restore some youthfulness to my body. 

I’m a technician who pays extreme attention to detail.

I’ve come to be influenced by rehabilitation industry pioneers like Kelly Starrett of MobilityWOD, Gray Cook of Functional Movement Systems, Andreo Spina of Functional Range Conditioning and others as well as eclectic and controversial movement teachers like Ido Portal of Ido Portal Method and Erwan LeCorre of MovNat. If you don’t know these guys, check them out!

By drawing on numerous movement disciplines like martial arts and parkour on top of a diverse lifting and athletic background I can extract commonalities in human movement that link all these disciplines together more than you might think and thereby help a wide range of clientele.

Personally, I grew up as an athlete ever since I could walk. My main sports were soccer, basketball, and volleyball, and I played everything else in between with the neighborhood kids for fun.

As most athletes have experienced, I had my fair share of injuries…multiple ankle sprains leading later to ankle impingement, reoccurring breath-taking back pain with tingling into my right foot, hip impingement, knee sprains and meniscus tears, shoulder impingement and rotator cuff injuries, wrist injuries, plantar fasciitis, stiff and achy muscles and joints…

It was rough at times. I recovered from all, but they all came back in varying degrees...that is, until I figured out how to take care of my body differently.

It took roughly 20 years of tinkering to come to the process I use now that has not only helped me regain the youth of my joints (in fact, I feel more mobile and strong than I was in high school!), but has also helped rebuild a few world champions and help many that were caught in relentless cycles of chronic or acute pain and injury.

That’s how Orlando Movement Practice was born...

I was frustrated with seeing patients come back to the clinic for the same issue because their insurance had put restrictions on how we could care for them, reimbursement was terrible, and most of the PTs had gotten burnt out. The reality is that this broken system forced us to see up to 4 people in one hour just to stay productive and quality suffered as a result.

You deserve better than that.

While most clinics give cookie cutter “best evidence-based exercises” for back pain or knee pain with little-to-no individualization offered, I share a straight-forward process to restore and rebuild the body based on the whole person in front of me.

​What's even more awesome, is I'm still on that same journey with you and will be for the rest of my life.

With that said, I can’t wait to share that process with you!

I hope you'll join me for one of my upcoming Community Movement Classes or come see me in person if you're looking for some specific help and guidance.

Dr. Brandon

P.S. Feel free to reach out via text or call at 407-900-8721 or email brandon@orlandomovement.com. I respond personally to every message I receive!