Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Sarah Peters had a number of scholarship opportunities in gymnastics waiting for her. Then she suffered a debilitating ankle injury, forcing her to rethink her life plans. That injury turned out to be a springboard to a new career path.
Peters, 30, of Long Beach, grew up in Smithtown with a fraternal twin sister, Carly. Their parents enrolled them in a variety of sports to see what they liked and, after trying both soccer and dance, Sarah fell in love with gymnastics. Carly became an accomplished golfer, and later joined the LPGA.
Children typically start gymnastics at around age 3. Peters was about 10 years behind other gymnasts, trying to make the Smithtown East High School team when she was 15. She practiced flips and other tricks on her front lawn.
“I just didn’t have any fear,” she recalled. “I would just throw my body in the air and do flips.”
In her first year on the varsity team, Peters placed third overall in the Suffolk County championship and qualified for the state championships. She began getting verbal offers for college scholarships.
In 2012, her senior year, she was performing her floor exercise, and on the takeoff for one of her flips, she rolled her ankle and tore ligaments, effectively ending her high school — and, she figured, her hoped-for college — athletic career.
The scholarship offers were rescinded, so Peters opted to attend SUNY Cortland to study elementary education. Making her way around the campus with crutches was challenging for her, so she decided to take a medical leave for the fall semester of her freshman year. She took prerequisite classes at Suffolk County Community College and began a physical therapy program, which she enjoyed. When she returned to Cortland in January 2013, she switched her major to exercise science.
“I just fell in love with the rehab process, and I had my own PT, and I was able to see other physical therapists go through it,” Peters said.
She went to physical therapy up to three times a week for over a year, working closely with a trainer, a physical therapist, a chiropractor and a sports specialist. She was told she probably wouldn’t be able to do gymnastics anymore, which motivated her to recover and train harder to prove the experts wrong.
“When you have an ankle injury,” Peters said, “not only do you have to go through the process and just be an average human walking around, but then you have to be a gymnast, and do back flips on a 4-inch-wide balance beam or pounce onto the vault.”
Peters had to learn how to trust herself and her ankle to join the gymnastics team, and fear sometimes crept in. She wasn’t able to do all four events, only the uneven bars and the beam. But in 2014, just two years after her injury, she competed at nationals and, defying the odds, was named an All-American in both events.
“I felt like all my hard work paid off,” she said, “pretty much like I felt like I accomplished what I came to do, what took me years to achieve.”
After graduating from Cortland in 2016, Peters spent three years at Touro University, in Manhattan, studying for a doctorate in physical therapy. In her last year of the program, she did clinical rotations in settings such as hospitals and outpatient offices, as far afield as San Diego.
Looking for a job in which she could work on weekends while in school, Peters was hired as a fitness trainer at the F45 gym, on West Park Avenue in Long Beach, where she was a member. She worked her way up to manager, and now oversees 10 trainers and 280 members.
She finished her doctorate in 2021, when the pandemic limited job opportunities in health care. Making the most of her connections at previous clinics, however, she started working at Tri Fit Therapy in Stony Brook.
She always had the goal of opening her own practice instead of working at one. Many of the members at F45 knew about Peters’s background in physical therapy, and asked for advice during workouts. That turned out to be the motivation she needed to open her own physical therapy practice, two floors above the gym, in April.
“A lot of those people want to see me for physical therapy, and then it’s like a full circle,” she said. “I treat them here, and then they get to see me in the workout class.”
Peters held a grand opening for her practice, Limitless Physical Therapy, on May 10. She teaches F45’s fitness classes on the first floor starting as early as 4:30 a.m., and later heads up to the third floor, where she treats her patients.
“I define physical therapy a little bit different than some other practices,” she said. “I like to be one on one with someone, because you can get full-time with that patient.”
Peters uses active release techniques, utilizing the gym’s equipment and pairing it with movement. One of her favorite techniques is “cupping,” a way of guiding a joint through a range of motion that makes use of suction cups. She also uses Graston scraping for scar mobilization, compression and laser therapy, soft-tissue massage and more.
“I feel like I’m probably one of the only people that does it,” she said of cupping. Indeed, virtually anyone familiar with physical therapy in the Long Beach area has come to recognize the distinct round cup marks on an athlete’s or patient’s skin as Peters’s work.
As an athlete who used to be the patient on the treatment table, she understands the emotional aspect of being injured. In her practice, she helps athletes work toward their personal goals and return to her fitness class or their sport of choice. For her, it creates that full-circle moment.
Her patients range from UFC fighters to triathletes to local recreational volleyball players and surfers, and the common ailments she sees include lower-back pain, ankle sprains and shoulder injuries.
Peters’s suggestion to avoid injury is to “try to find the little things that you can thread into your daily life that overall will make a bigger difference” — doing calf stretches while brushing your teeth, for example. A stretching routine also helps relieve stress and tension throughout the body. She notes that, whether driving or sitting at a desk, people tend to default to a position of forward motion, which can lead to a more permanent forward-tilted posture. The solution? Hip flexor and hamstring stretches.
