Most athletes experience a hard line between their S&C coach and their physical therapist. Two separate offices, two separate conversations, two sets of recommendations that don't always agree. ARC Performance Rehab exists because that separation doesn't serve the athlete.
We built ARC from a shared belief: that performance science and sports physical therapy speak the same language when practiced at a high enough level. Force production, movement quality, load tolerance, return to sport — these aren't different conversations. They're the same conversation, held across a continuum.
ARC is where that continuum lives. From the weight room to the clinic and back again — without losing the thread.
I was a 90s kid who grew up doing everything physical. Nine years of martial arts, baseball, football through high school and college, a stint at rugby. As the levels got higher, sport became more regimented — the play got taken out of it. That's when my relationship with sport shifted. I started using it differently: as a pre-test post-test environment for my own training interventions. Leaning too heavily into powerlifting methods without the right balance made me slower on the field — finding emphasis models that developed multiple qualities simultaneously made me more well-rounded. Sport became the laboratory where the training hypotheses got tested.
Alongside the athletics I was finding philosophy through sport itself — the relationship between mind and body, how one shapes the other, how performance lives at that intersection. Space and flight fascinated me too — not as a career, but as a frontier. The unknown has always been more interesting than the settled.
My father was an engineer who worked on the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim. He digitized hand-drawn renderings and got CATIA and CAD working on projects where no one had a roadmap. What he taught me wasn't a work ethic — it was something more specific: focus on what excites you. The development is the journey.
That thread runs through everything I do now. Coaching elite sprinters, teaching at Mt. SAC, building VBTfit, finishing a PhD — it's all the same compulsion expressed across different surfaces. None of us have it figured out. We pursue what we enjoy and build from what we find.
Sports and community were always at the center of Natalia's life. She competed in volleyball through college, stepped on a bodybuilding stage, and coached — both as a strength and conditioning coach and a sport coach at Mt. SAC. Through all of it she saw what life actually asks of people physically. She watched what happens when the body stops cooperating, when strength fades, when pain becomes the baseline. She watched it happen to her father.
That became the decision point. She didn't want to accept it passively. She wanted to understand the body well enough to change the outcome — for him, and for the people around her. That desire drove her from kinesiology at Whittier College through a master's in exercise science, into a doctorate in physical therapy at USC, and through a sports residency that took her onto the field at the CrossFit Games and into professional football with Angel City FC.
Today she runs a clinic, leads a team, and brings the same intent she started with — keep people strong, keep them capable, keep them in the game. At ARC, that clinical depth is what makes the performance work complete. Rehabilitation isn't the end of the athlete's arc. It's part of it.