Dr. Emily Novoa—Ortho + Pelvic PT

06/16/2026

06/16/2026

Silver Falls State Park, Oregon. The Trail of Ten Falls: 7.2 miles, ten waterfalls, trail legs earned. 🌲

Here’s something most athletes underrate. The woods aren’t your recovery-day consolation prize. They’re a different kind of training stimulus, and your nervous system is part of what you’re training.

Uneven terrain demands more from you than a treadmill ever will: reactive stabilization, proprioception, force absorption on every weird foot strike. That’s real work. But while your body handles that, something else is happening upstairs.

Self-generated optic flow, the visual world streaming past as you move through it, quiets the brain’s threat circuitry in a way you don’t get standing still. Forward ambulation taps the same dopamine-driven “keep going” pathway that builds resilience under load. The left-right rhythm of running pings both hemispheres. You’re not just getting fitter. You’re teaching your system to stay regulated under stress, which is the skill that actually holds up on race day, in rehab, and in life.

This is why I keep coming back to the trail. It’s where strength and steadiness get built in the same stride.

Where do you do your best thinking? Trail, road, or track? 👇

Sources in the comments 👇

04/24/2026

Embodiment isn’t about reacting to every message from your body with fear, or pushing past every signal it sends. It’s the act of noting.

Feel it. Locate it. Name it. Move with it.

Be curious.

Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping you safe. For some of us that signal gets drowned out. For others it becomes deafening. Embodiment is becoming fluent in what it’s trying to tell you. Understanding it rather than silencing it or surrendering to it.

You can be embodied and lift heavy sh*t, or simply move without bracing for impact.

The key is choosing pushing over punishment. Flourishing over fear.

To those who have pushed themselves into the ground. And to those who have been too afraid to begin. You were never meant to silence the body that has carried you this far.

04/20/2026

For a lot of people, that waiting has a history.
Years of being told their pain was normal. That it was stress. That it would get better after a baby, after menopause, after they just learned to relax.

Bodies that were dismissed, minimized, and handed back without answers.

That’s not just a medical failure. Over time, it becomes something deeper — a fracture in the relationship between a person and their own body. A learned habit of overriding, ignoring, surviving.

This is what embodiment actually means. Not a wellness trend. Not a yoga buzzword.

It’s the practice of coming back into a body you had very good reasons to leave.

Pelvic health care lives in that space. It’s clinical, yes — tissue, tension, nerve, breath. But it’s also something quieter than that. It’s learning to listen again. To approach your body not as something to manage or push through, but as something to be in conversation with.
You deserved that conversation a long time ago.

That’s where we start. 🌱

04/20/2026

Hi, I’m Dr. Emily Novoa — pelvic health + orthopedic PT. Your body and nervous system are in constant conversation. I just help you listen.

I spent seven years in a post-doctoral residency and fellowship developing my skills in manual therapy — joint mobilization, manipulation, and myofascial release — with some of the best clinicians in my field as mentors.

After all of that time and education I realized something was missing. How is it possible that we always leave the pelvic floor out of the conversation??! 🤦🏼‍♀️ So I dove into even more education and mentorship to become a pelvic health PT.

Through that journey I started learning that you simply cannot ignore the central nervous system. We live in a world that is constantly pulling us out of our own bodies. My job is helping you find your way back home— so you can move better, feel better, and trust your body again.

My toolkit:
🦴 Joint mobilization + manipulation
🖐️ Myofascial release
🌀 Pelvic floor assessment + treatment
🪡 Functional dry needling
🧠 Nervous system + movement retraining