Hey! I’m Ali.

I started dancing at the age of 2. I am formally trained in ballet and danced professionally throughout the United States and Austria until I retired to go to school full time. Because of this, a lot of Stretch Therapy UK grounded itself in my intricate understanding of the body in motion. When I retired from ballet I picked up horse riding where I quickly started competitive show jumping. When I was 18, I came off a horse when training and fell into a 5-day coma requiring emergency brain surgery. I spent almost a month in intensive care and had to learn how to speak and walk again. I convinced my neurologist to let me use horse riding as a part of my rehab but it took years to understand the changes that had happened to my brain and body. The first time I ever stepped foot in a gym I was 20, and I was way out of my element.

But I kept at it and eventually fell in love with weight training. I had long since moved to London from Miami, completed a Bachelors in International Political Relations, a Masters in Political Philosophy then worked in London prisons and on technology at the Ministry of Justice. Fast forward to the pandemic and I had to start working from home full time and this was not for me. So I quit my job, threw caution to the wind, and started training to be a stretch therapist.

I quickly fell in love with the first course I joined, got qualified as a stretch therapist, and then got further qualified in sports massage, deep tissue massage, human movement, muscle testing and integrated manual therapy. I ripped all my studies apart, melded together the best of each discipline and perfected it after my own understanding of how people move. The Stretch Therapy UK Method was born and is now internationally recognized as a method of practice by the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity.