Rachel Kilpatrick-Hyra likes being a physical therapist and Pilates instructor, and she’s been a successful one, expanding to the point where she was hiring others to work with clients while she put more and more time in managing the business.
Which actually got in the way of her being a physical therapist.
But there’s a solution: She and her family (which includes two girls, ages 9 and 7) recently moved to Fairfield County when her husband Andrew’s career as a musician pulled him back to his hometown, Bethel, for a project he’s working on with his sister, the actress Meg Ryan. So now (on Dec. 1) Kilpatrick-Hyra’s opened Resolution Wellness physical therapy studio at 22 Grove St. in downtown Darien. It’s a one-person shop, for now.
The studio offers both Pilates and physical therapy.
Resolution Wellness owner Rachel Kilpatrick-Hyra and the “Cadillac” table (called that because it’s one of the biggest and most expensive of therapy tables).
The new studio gets her back to what she wants: “I like doing the work; I like helping people,” she said, “so it’s really fun for me to be hands-on instead of doing the human resources and other stuff that I don’t really enjoy.”
Rachel Kilpatrick-Hyra, owner of Resolution Physical Therapy, now at 22 Grove St.
At one point, when they were living in the Atlanta area (where she grew up), Kilpatrick-Hyra had opened a few Resolution Physical Therapy studios there, and she’s opened a few in California, although Resolution’s only got two locations now — Darien and her 13-year-old studio in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.
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Resolution Wellness is the Darien studio of
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Her physical therapy is largely based on Pilates, an alternative to working with stationary bicycles and weights (which her therapy may still include). One advantage of Pilates is “it’s non-weight-bearing, so you don’t get the inflammation that you get sometimes with weights.”
22 Grove St., where Resolution Wellness has moved into the second floor. The house is to the right of Grove Street Plaza.
Many people don’t realize that insurance companies will pay for physical therapy that uses Pilates, she said. “In fact, you can combine the two [Pilates and more traditional physical therapy] and we’ve gotten great results.”
Concentrating on the body’s core muscles, including in the back, helps solve a lot of problems in the limbs, she said, but added, “I also do knees and shoulders and hips and ankles — all the fun stuff.”
Her 1,000-square-foot studio takes up the entire second floor of the white clapboard house on Grove Street (next door to the Grove Street Plaza buildings) that was formerly occupied by an insurance company.
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She does individual sessions there as well as classes with as many as four clients at a time. She also makes house calls, which is especially helpful for elderly clients. She’s had some with Parkinson’s disease and one with Alzheimer’s.
Why pick Darien for her studio’s location? Kilpatrick-Hyra and her husband enjoy the town, and sometime you just might see them hanging out downtown.
Two of four similar training devices at Resolution Wellness.