About LJ

A physiotherapy graduate and Wesbrook Scholar (1996) from the University of British Columbia, Canada, Dr. Linda-Joy (LJ) Lee pursued ongoing manual therapy training with the Orthopaedic Division of the Canadian Physiotherapy Association (CPA) and became a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Manipulative Physiotherapy (FCAMPT) in 1999 with distinction. In 2001 LJ was certified in Intramuscular Stimulation as developed by Chan Gunn (CGIMS).

With a background in competitive figure skating and a love for playing outside, LJ has always been passionate about movement — understanding movement, and figuring out how to change movement so that people feel better, optimize performance, and have a positive experience of their body.

Over time, LJ’s interest in optimizing whole body movement led her to combine functional movement analysis with specific manual therapy skills to change movement and look at the connections between regional dysfunction, pain, and whole body performance. These were the beginnings of the concepts to determine when a pain-free but dysfunctional region could be the Driver for pain somewhere else in the body. LJ’s patient experiences and personal injuries stimulated her ideas around motor control and specific exercise protocols for the thorax, and new “thoracic ring” techniques, which would grow into her Thoracic Ring Approach™. She started teaching physiotherapists these concepts as applied to “core” stability, low back, hip and pelvis function, postpartum health, and thoracic, neck and upper extremity assessment, treatment and exercise rehabilitation.

From her work with challenging patient cases and the need to find a way to treat her own injuries, LJ became fascinated with the thorax early in her career. Combining her clinical ideas and research from other areas of the spine, LJ proposed multiple mechanisms to explain how dysfunction in the thorax could “drive,” or cause, many distal problems in the body — from neck pain, shoulder impingement, and altered neurodynamics to low back pain, pelvic girdle pain, incontinence and prolapse (Lee LJ 2005, 2007). LJ’s clinical ideas about motor control of the thorax and thoracic-driven abdominal wall and lumbopelvic dysfunction led her to complete a PhD at the University of Queensland (2013).

LJ is known for her unique way of looking at total body function in meaningful tasks related to function and performance, to find the Primary Driver — the true underlying cause — for clients’ pain and problems. The assessment framework of Meaningful Task Analysis (Lee LJ 2008) was developed in the context of LJ’s Thoracic Ring Approach™ and became a key feature of the Integrated Systems Model for Pain and Disability (ISM) (Lee LJ, Lee DG 2010) and ConnectTherapy™ (Lee LJ 2014).

LJ has published her research and clinical ideas in peer-reviewed journals and books. She is an Associate Editor for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, an Associate Member at the Centre for Hip Health & Mobility, a Professional Associate at the School of Rehabilitation Sciences, McMaster University, and an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences.

The capacity of the body and mind to heal, and the beauty of human movement, inspires LJ daily. In her work and in her life she loves to explore possibilities… and the probable impossibilities. LJ enjoys creating a supportive learning environment that allows participants to challenge and develop their clinical reasoning skills, examine and translate science, explore the power of touch and awareness, and see movement and function in the body in a more connected way.