Your story. What’s your goal for coming to Barefoot Physiotherapy?
We will listen to your story, your goals and what a good result is for you. We understand the frustration involved with your body not doing what you want it to and we want to hear about it. Together, we will then decide the most important area to address first to achieve your goals.
Determine if investigations or other health professionals are needed at this stage (MRI, XRay, Bloods, Dr).
With specialised tests, we can determine whether there are any investigations (scans/blood tests) or other professionals (Doctor/Specialist/Pharmacist) that are needed now. All communication with other practitioners will be done using your preferred pronouns and name, as guided by you.
*We may come back to this step later if required
Test if your nerves are involved in the condition.
Using gentle, nerve-specific tests that are non-aggravating, we will determine if your nerves are contributing to your condition. We will let you know if they are involved and to what extent.
- If there is nerve irritation; we will move on to step 4
- If there is NO nerve irritation; we will move on to step 5
Treat your nerves and teach them how to keep them happy.
If we have found your nerves to be a contributing factor in your condition we need to treat them first.
The type of treatment we use will depend on which is the most effective for your body as everyone is an individual. We will continue that treatment until your nerves are testing 100%.
One of the most important things to learn in this step is how to keep your nerves happy between sessions so that you maintain the gains we achieve with treatment. We will teach you this in the clinic as well as email you with information to read about managing your condition.
Thorough assessment of your whole body (muscles, joints, movements, thoughts, worries).
Once the nerves are fully settled (or there is no nerve involvement) we will do a thorough assessment of your whole body (muscles, joints, movements, thoughts/worries) to get the full picture of what is going on. This is an important step to ensure that we don’t miss anything as we are searching for the true underlying cause of your condition.
Systematic testing process to work out the primary cause of your condition.
From the thorough assessment we will have compiled a list of significant findings in your body. These findings may be tight muscles, stiff joints, weak muscles, worried thoughts, poor postural control etc. and it is normal to have a list with over a dozen findings on it.
From the list, together we will prioritise which are the key findings to test first. The way that we test these findings is by performing TDTs (Treatment-Direction-Tests) to the limited movements in your body that are the most important to you to change first. For example; if lifting your arm up above your head or bending over to touch your toes is the most important movement to gain back for you, we will use that as our testing movement. Through the TDT process, we will discover which finding in your body is the primary cause of your condition.
Most of the time, we find that that the underlying cause is not exactly where you are feeling your symptoms. This is sometimes difficult to understand, so make sure you have this discussion with your Barefoot Physiotherapist or read the information in our Learning Centre online.
Treatment to the underlying cause with continued assessment to ensure we achieve your good result.
Once we confirm the underlying cause we will treat it to reduce its impact on the rest of your body. We will continually reassess your movements, muscles and joints to measure the improvements that are being made from the treatment. This way we can confirm that we are on track to meet your goals and good result.
Teach you how to take care of your underlying cause with muscle retraining and self training.
To prevent build-up of strain to the primary cause of your condition we will teach you two main areas of self-management
A) How to treat the structure yourself or how someone else can help you treat it (e.g. partner, family member, friend) and
B) How to use your body in a way to prevent build-up of strain on that area. For some people this is changing their posture at work and for others it may be strengthening a certain muscle group to improve their running technique. Like anything this will need to be individualised to you. If there is a particular technique or posture you would like us to check please ask us and we will prioritise this for you in our sessions when appropriate.
Tune up sessions at Barefoot with increasing intervals between to ensure your body stays happy.
To ensure your body stays in optimal shape and you prevent future injury, it is important that you check in with us at increasing intervals for tune up sessions. In these sessions we measure and identify if there is any strain building up in your body before it becomes a problem. This means we can get on top of it quickly and you can spend more time doing the things you love, with less time injured.
As well as continuing treatment to the primary cause of your condition, we may also need to treat some secondary areas in your body. These secondary areas are findings that make small improvements to one or two things in your body (nowhere near as significant as the primary cause), but are an effective part of keeping your body in optimal shape.
Live your Barefoot lifestyle.
We encourage you to look after your mind, body and soul and live a Barefoot Lifestyle every day.
What’s the Next Step?
Contact our Clinic on 1300 842 850 to find out more or to book an appointment. You can also book an appointment online by following the link below.

Acknowledgement of Country
Barefoot Physiotherapy proudly operates on Jagera and Turrbul land. We acknowledge Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognise the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities.
We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.