Exploring Life & Business with Katherine Koch, PT, DPT of Sage Physical Therapy LLC

Today we’d like to introduce you to Katherine Koch, PT, DPT.

Hi Katherine, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Sage Physical Therapy was born from the idea that the specialized, nuanced, and powerful specialty of pelvic floor physical therapy can help make the world a better place. The term ‘pelvic floor’ has become omnipresent these days if you’re a twenty-to-fifty something woman scrolling Instagram, taking Pilates, or talking with your girlfriends. The words kegel, diastasis recti, and prolapse might even come up. I love that these words are starting to be said louder than a whisper. I love that women are starting to learn about their bodies. I love that we’re empowering ourselves and our community to know that there’s more out there for us than our mothers and those before us knew. What I don’t love is the occasional gap in how we’re getting there. When it comes to the pelvic floor, there’s a substantial amount of generalization, misinformation, and simplification of this complex and sensitive part of the body. I founded Sage Physical Therapy with the goal of closing those gaps. We specialize in treating our patients with high quality, individualized, and compassionate care for pelvic floor issues with a whole-body and whole-person approach.

To expand further, this journey started when I earned dual undergraduate degrees in Exercise Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University. This naturally led to earning my Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Regis University, where I began to merge my passion and expertise in rehabilitative exercise to advocate specifically for women. I am not the first person to recognize the major disparity in care for women’s health in our healthcare system, and I was proud to join the millions of other healthcare providers fighting for gender equality within our healthcare system. Today, this fight is more present than ever, and I founded Sage Physical Therapy to use my knowledge and ability to help women fully participate in their lives and in society without limitation. This includes the new mom who can’t go for a run to clear her head and promote her healthy lifestyle because she leaks when she runs. This includes the perimenopausal CEO who has to go to the bathroom every thirty minutes and can’t fully participate in board meetings. This includes the firefighter who has sciatica pain and can’t run up stairs in full gear. All of these women (and all other women!) deserve to participate fully in their lives and in society without limitation, and we at Sage Physical Therapy are doing what’s in our power to ensure pelvic floor dysfunction doesn’t limit these ladies from reaching their full potential.

Of course, everyone has a pelvic floor, including men! While women are naturally more susceptible to pelvic floor dysfunction (we can blame pregnancy and hormones among other factors), men absolutely can and do experience pelvic floor dysfunction. We also treat men and those in the LGBTQ+ community and we love uplifting men and people just as much as we love helping women.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
As with many things in life, if you zoom in enough to see the cracks and gaps in the road, you’ll find them. Once you zoom out, those cracks and gaps get smaller and smaller until you find yourself flying up at 10,000 feet noticing the solid black lines beneath you. Entrepreneurship can be a vulnerable, lonely, and scary experience. I combatted these feelings with three focuses: community, vision, and values. When I was in the building phase of Sage Physical Therapy (and still to this day), I knew that as long as I followed my vision and values with every decision I made, I could trust the process that I would find success as I define it. To me, success means doing our best to create trusting relationships with our patients, providing expert level care, and always pursuing betterment of our knowledge and practice. Anything that follows is a cherry on top.

I’ve also worked to align my practice with like-minded community health providers within the Platt Park neighborhood and beyond. We are incredibly lucky to be part of a community that includes a wide variety of excellent health and wellness providers near and far. While entrepreneurship and practice ownership are wildly busy endeavors with a never-ending list of things to do, I’m always working to keep up with our neighbors and lift up our community. I know that our practice, our neighbors’ work, and our patients will all benefit when we do our best work together.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Sage Physical Therapy LLC?
As I’ve mentioned, Sage Physical Therapy specializes in pelvic floor physical therapy. The pelvic floor is a group of muscles that sits at the bottom of every person’s pelvis and controls anything that comes in or out of that area. This means the pelvic floor is involved in bladder, bowel, and sexual function. It also helps to stabilize your pelvis and works very closely with all the other muscles around it including the glutes, core, inner thighs, and more. The fact that the pelvic floor muscles are involved in so many important tasks means when something goes wrong, it can significantly impact a person. Common conditions we treat include urinary incontinence (leakage), urinary urgency, constipation, pain with intercourse, low back pain, and hip pain. We also specialize in pregnancy and postpartum prehab and rehab, helping women prepare their bodies for the stress and strain of pregnancy with specific exercises, prepare for delivery with delivery prep, and get back to their new normal selves with postpartum rehab.

Our unique approach to pelvic floor physical therapy may seem counterintuitive: we don’t just treat the pelvic floor. Because the pelvic floor muscles work so closely with all of the other muscles around it, we treat the pelvic floor with a whole-body orthopedic approach. You won’t just be laying on a table doing kegels and breathing at Sage Physical Therapy; you’ll be doing specific, targeted corrective exercises to retrain what’s not working so well. Example: If someone is leaking urine when they jump, we know that is a pelvic floor issue, but we also look at the larger kinetic chain to ensure every muscle and joint from the foot up to the pelvic floor (and even above that!) are doing their jobs correctly. We like to say that the pelvic floor is that type-A member of the group project: if someone else isn’t doing their job, the pelvic floor will take over, but it may not be happy about it. We’re experts in the evaluation and interpretation of how everything along that kinetic chain works together. If someone isn’t participating, we can find that and we can fix that.

From a brand perspective, this is something outside of my usual realm that I had to really hone in on from the beginning. I was taught and trained to be an excellent pelvic floor physical therapist, not to be a brand manager. I developed the Sage Physical Therapy brand based on my intuition and feeling of what high quality pelvic floor PT should offer. The brand design should evoke feelings of calm, trust, and quality. Don’t get me wrong – I also know when to ask for help! I am lucky to have fantastic right-brained creatives in my corner who continue to help me develop and build upon the Sage Physical Therapy brand.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Nope!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sageptdenver.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sageptdenver/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sageptdenver/

Image Credits
Tory Putnam