I’ve spent my career on one question: what happens after the procedure?

From my grandmother’s living room to the Olympic Training Center

I grew up in San Ysidro, California. We didn’t have money for much of anything, and I was raised by my grandmother.

When I was 13, she needed a hip replacement. Government funding covered the surgery, but not the physical therapy afterwards. So I found a physical therapy clinic in the Yellow Pages, got on a bus, and asked them for a program. I kept making that trip for three months, bringing home each new stage and taking her through it, until she’d recovered. I didn’t know I was already doing physical therapy. I just knew it was working, and I fell in love with helping people get their lives back.

So I chased it. Kinesiology at San Diego State, where I was named Outstanding Graduate of the Year from a class of 10,000. Then my doctorate at Washington University in St. Louis, one of the top-ranked physical therapy programs in the country, including four months studying movement under Dr. Shirley Sahrmann.

Then the residency. The Ohio State sports physical therapy residency took five physical therapists from across the country that year. I was one of them. Fifteen months later I came home as San Diego’s first residency-trained sports clinical specialist.

Then I spent three years as the physical therapist for the United States Olympic Committee at the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center, treating Olympic and Paralympic athletes. After that came NFL Combine training, getting athletes ready to perform at their best before the draft.

When a career rides on the next six weeks, you find out fast what works and what’s just habit.

Next I became the concierge physical therapist for pro tennis player Ryan Harrison, travelling with him across the country and around the world: the French Open, Wimbledon and many more of the biggest events in tennis. Out of a suitcase, with one athlete’s body as the only job.

Then I decided to bring all of that experience home to my own community. That’s why I opened Sports Performance Physical Therapy: to give everyday San Diegans the same standard of care. Today we have two locations, in Chula Vista and Kearny Mesa.

Other physical therapists started asking how we got the results we did, so I started teaching. That became Chris Garcia Academy: 179 podcast episodes, over 54,000 downloads, and years of mentoring sports PTs on getting better outcomes for their clients.

Then the clients who needed us most changed. More and more of them had had stem cell injections, from clinics all over the world, and the procedure had given them a head start. The months at home decide how far they go, so I built Stem Cell Recovery Experts around that.

I don’t see clients one-on-one anymore. I build the programs with my staff therapists and I oversee every case. But the question is the same one I started with at 13: how do I help this person move again, and get their life back?