My Story

Hi! I’d like to introduce myself Pam Gatewood, MPT, PT owner and sole physical therapist at Changing the Game Physical Therapy, LLC. I’ve been a physical therapist for about 17 years. I worked in a work comp setting for about 12 years. Then, I switched to a private practice finding out that people actually do like to get better and my efforts are not all lost. Once I started having children, I realized a whole new world of physical therapy.

I have two amazing girls who are now 6 and 9 years old. The first baby was breech which led me to a scheduled C-section. The second baby was a VBAC. With both of those pregnancies and births, I thought as a physical therapist I can just heal myself and I’ll be OK. However, that was not the case. I learned that I needed to go to a Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist (PFPT) after my first birth, the C-section for urinary incontinence. Now looking back, I wish I would’ve gone to a PFPT during both of my pregnancies. I think that would have helped with my pubic symphysis pain, groin pain, low back pain, and urinary incontinence. I also wonder if that might have helped with some of the tearing during birth and just the overall functioning of my pelvic floor and diaphragm. After going through all of this, I started to take an interest in my female patients and how their bodies were functioning and I realized that with an insurance based practice, I was not able to incorporate all the things that I thought might be the best for my patients.

Which leads me to today, where I have opened my own business and I actually get to come to see you in your own home for a two hour evaluation and help women move forward with the changes in their bodies that have occurred with pregnancy or an injury and help them return to their sport or exercise program. Just to clarify, I take an external and exercise based approach for the pelvic floor dysfunction. I have some great PFPT referrals when that is needed.

One of the main differences, that I look at whether you are pregnant or postpartum or maybe you haven’t had any children at all, is your breathing mechanics and your posture and how they work together. I know what you are thinking “My breathing is fine! I breathe every day!”

Breathing is so important and it gets overlooked all the time. It could be the missing link as to why you still have pain or can’t get your abdominals and pelvic floor to have coordinated motor control. Functional breathing can help strengthen and lengthen your pelvic floor. Functional breathing also helps stimulate the Vagus Nerve. The vagus nerve when stimulated activates the parasympathetic nervous system and puts us into that calm relaxed state and helps with digestion, heart rate and lung control. If we are not breathing optimally then we stay in the sympathetic “fight or flight” nervous system which is great when we encounter a Mountain Lion. But it is not so great for daily living. When we are in “fight or flight” we are not digesting well, we are not thinking well, our circulation is decreased just to name a few side effects.

Functional Breathing also helps our lymphatic system function efficiently. The lymphatic system is our garbage disposal system . It takes everything that we don’t need and gets rid of it for us. The lymphatic system also helps fight infections, colds, cancer and even the coronavirus. I hope now you can see how breathing affects every part of our body. So breathing is probably one of the most important things we need to restore and make functional again. One of the reasons our breathing becomes dysfunctional is due to pregnancy. The baby pushes up on our diaphragm and doesn’t allow it to extend fully down or sometimes that baby is stuck on one side of the ribcage and doesn’t allow us to breathe well. Once we have the baby and the ribcage can be still stuck out in that position. How many of us now have a larger bra size after pregnancy and breastfeeding even years later? I’m not talking cup size either. We all know that those shrink after breastfeeding😩. Some other things that can influence our breathing mechanics even if we haven’t had a baby can be injuries, and/or maybe we were taught certain breathing strategies to help us at the time but now those strategies no longer optimize our breathing. Our bodies are so smart and so great at compensating to find the path of least resistance making it easier for us to move. However, those compensation patterns are not optimizing our bodies’ movement patterns long term.

And that’s where I come in! I help bring awareness to movement patterns, pressure strategies, posture and breathing mechanics on a daily level. If we don’t change those dysfunctional movement patterns daily, just doing a half hour of corrective exercises isn’t going to change the problem. We need to look at body awareness with the mind and create that mind-body connection. This is an amazing journey! Let me know if you would like to start this process!