Ashlee De Nooy, Body Works Women’s Health & Fitness
Ashlee De Nooy started her career as a physical therapist treating exactly the kind of conditions most people think of when they consider the profession: the musculoskeletal rehabilitation of broken and torn parts – a patient healing from a broken bone or recovering after surgery.
But a new season in her own life led her down a different path, and it is making a tremendous impact on the women she sees in her practice.
De Nooy had worked for years in outpatient orthopedic physical therapy. Then she moved to South Carolina from Illinois and started her business, Body Works Women’s Health & Wellness in 2018. The practice’s main focus is helping women with pelvic floor issues. It was an area suggested to De Nooy when she was pregnant with her third child.
“I had no idea that some of the things that I had experienced personally with my other pregnancies were related to the pelvic floor, and it’s things that I could have helped and I didn’t even know,” she says.
“When I was pregnant with my first child, I started having low back issues,” De Nooy says. “My back went out. With my second one, I started noticing that I had some abdominal muscle separation.”
De Nooy says she was told that it was “totally normal.” Training in women’s pelvic floor therapy taught her that while many issues are common, especially during and after pregnancy, that doesn’t make them normal. She began to work with women to address and treat pelvic floor problems, first as an addition to her regular physical therapy practice, and then as her primary focus.
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“I just knew that there are a lot of common things, but not normal things that happen to women,” she says. “A lot of the commonalities are low back pain, hip pain, pelvic pain, leaking. So many people say ‘leaking, oh, that’s normal.’ Those common things are not normal. They’re just common.”
Growing her practice has meant yet another transition for De Nooy.
“I started off as an orthopedic physical therapist turned pelvic floor physical therapist, and then I realized, once I hired somebody else, that I really enjoyed the business side of things.”
She says it surprised her as much as anyone. De Nooy didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur, but as her business evolved, she has been able to create the space she wanted, and with it, an atmosphere designed to facilitate the type of healing her clients need. Her staff also incorporates technology to address many of the issues women deal with after pregnancy and as a result of aging, many of which are intimate issues that are only beginning to be discussed in recent years.
“I wanted Body Works to be women-focused only because I wanted a safe, comfortable place for women to go that felt relatable for them,” she says.
A focused practice helps reduce some of the awkwardness women might feel if they are sharing the space with people who are there for another type of physical therapy.
“Women have really loved the safety and the comfort when they come into Body Works,” De Nooy says.
As she grows her business, De Nooy is also committed to using her role to educate other women about the things she wished she had known during her own pregnancies.
“I wanted to educate the public and educate the community that these issues are something that we can help with,” she says. “Some people think that it’s just a normal part of aging or pregnancy or postpartum, but I wanted to be able to educate them on that.”
Learn more at bodyworks-physicaltherapy.com.
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