Honor The Call: Building Healing Beyond The Body with Dr. Sam

A key opens more than a door when the mission behind it is bigger than a workout. We share how StrongHarte Fitness returns—not as another studio—but as a sanctuary built to fuse movement science, nervous system regulation, and identity-level healing under one roof. The journey winds from escaping a broken insurance model to building a cash-based practice, surviving a pandemic pivot, and carrying the weight and wisdom of grief after losing a sister to overdose. That pain sharpened our purpose: people don’t just need sessions; they need continuity, community, and tools that change their days.

We talk candidly about starting in a rented apartment, becoming a “glorified landlord,” and realizing the brand wasn’t a room—it was the rigor, compassion, and results people felt. Then comes the twist: a client’s offhand comment leads to a 2,500-square-foot space in Thousand Oaks, zoned for everything we do. Instead of saying yes on adrenaline, we sat with it. What emerged is a clear plan: year one focused on twenty high-touch clients integrating physical therapy, strength, breath, and somatic skills; monthly soulful circles where we listen and teach; quarterly Harte Conscious Creators events; and workshops like yoga for longevity customized to injury history.

Along the way, we outline a smarter model—no more renting out rooms that dilute the brand. We dig into why discharging at 60 percent better keeps people stuck, how regulation skills unlock better recovery, and why reframing your story is as important as hip stability or shoulder mechanics. The goal is simple and audacious: people leave different than they arrive, with precise drills, micro-practices for stress, and a narrative that invites agency. If you’ve been craving real change, not just reps, this is your map and your invitation.

Subscribe, share this with someone who needs a hopeful reset, and leave a review to help more people find their way to stronger hearts and steadier lives.

To book your FREE discovery call with Dr. Sam, click the link below:

https://calendly.com/drharte/free-discovery-call-w-dr-harte

Transcript

Reopening Strongheart Fitness

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Welcome back, everybody, to the truth about addiction. Today is a solo episode, and I'm just gonna come right out and say it. I am announcing the reopening of strong heart fitness. It is happening, you guys. And I didn't even know it was in the purview. So let me explain. I've been a practicing doctor of physical therapy since 2010. I worked for somebody else for three years, quickly realized that I was entering a broken system and that if I stayed inside of it, I would be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. And to be honest, starting Strongheart Fitness in 2013 wasn't the plan, at least not that quickly. But I was in a marital crisis that forced me to figure out ways to make additional streams of income. So with that pressure against me coupled with where are all these patients going in this clinic that I'm working in when their insurance decides that the person is well enough. They've come in for 12 sessions, they're 60% better, and now they're getting discharged. Well, the pressure that was against me out of financial fear forced me to ask the patients that question: where are you guys going? What about getting to 100%? And lo and behold, every single one of them went, I don't know. I guess I'll hire a trainer. And that is when I stepped in and said, Don't train with a trainer, train with your doctor. I can do that. I can be your coach. And what's so cool is I know your history of injury, I know how to treat it. If anything flares up, I've got you. I can put my clinician hat on, and then we can get so good at how we move we could stay ahead of the inflammatory process and actually prevent injury. And so what started in an apartment that I was renting in my marital crisis grew into a cash-based physical therapy and wellness space that I had for 10 years. At one time, there were four other practitioners in the space with me who did amazing healing modalities. There was anything from acupuncture, massage, podiatry, psychotherapy, pelvic floor PT, under one roof. And it had become what the vision was to an extent, a one-stop shop for health and wellness. The problem was that I had so much interest in people renting from me because I had built a really nice space, but they weren't my employees, they weren't contractors under my brand. So I wasn't actually building my brand. I was a glorified landlord. It was fantastic financially because it cut my overhead down significantly. So most of the money I made as a practitioner I got to keep. And then the pandemic happened. So all those practitioners fled because nobody came in person. It was just me in this space. And I remember thinking, oh my god, I am the brand. Strongheart Fitness isn't the brand. I, Samantha Hart, I'm the brand. And I need to start moving my content online. I need to start thinking about this differently. I'm this sober woman who's navigated a ton of spiritual adversity. I have a lot to say about that. What about that part of what I do? What does that even look like? Yeah, I'm great at the body, but there's all this other stuff. So I use that time over the pandemic while I still had my space to shoot a ton of content. I made some fitness programs. I shot motivation Mondays, Fun Fact Fridays. I mean, I started putting together a library of things. And I will be the first to admit, I am a visionary. I am so good and dreaming up something big and beautiful, something that people need too. And then I can execute, but carrying forward the full execution of the vision and raising the bar and making the ceiling so high that it's unstoppable, I haven't quite done that yet. I haven't quite figured that out. I had a successful, profitable cash-based practice, less so. I made ends meet during the pandemic, but less so when that happened. But then I got struck with a personal tragedy, which, if you guys know me and my story, you already know, which was on March 13th, 2022, when I got a call that my big sister Jessica died of a drug overdose. And that was a call I was dreading for years. She had been struggling so deeply and so often with brief periods of recovery. But god damn it, that call was a call I was dreading, and I got it. And I'll never forget where I was. I was in the Austin Airport with my husband. I dropped to my knees, I sobbed. And I honestly don't remember anything else about that day. My husband has since told me that I turned to him and said, I'm writing a book. On the airplane of that day, I turned to him and I said that. This whole other thing about being well, changing our mindset, reframing our story, shattering our limiting beliefs, walking a spiritual path, they had been on my heart as a clinician of the body for years. But I didn't know what to do with them. And then when the pandemic happened, I was just trying to survive like all of us. When she died, I knew that my book had to tackle the mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual side of health, of wellness, of healing. Within a year of starting to write my book, I moved with my family from the west side of Los Angeles to Thousand Oaks, which is about an hour north. So I was commuting, and the business was kind of stalling. People weren't really coming back in. Wasn't a great time to drum up a bunch of new in-person business. And my husband and I just had a moment, and this thing was built from our marital crisis, and we were together again. The idea of giving the place up was so frightening to me. It was a little bit a part of my identity in the aftermath of okay, if this marriage doesn't work out, I have my business. And now I was gonna give it up and lean completely on him as I wrote this book, as I figured out I was gonna do with my life. It was so scary, but I knew it was the right thing to do at the time, and so I subleased my space. I had a few years left on my lease and I gave it over to somebody else. And I have been without a home, so to speak, for my business for a few years. I wasn't even looking for a space. I've been coaching people online. I have a home office in my house in Thousand Oaks, so the people who live nearby, they've come there. Of course, my work has expanded quite a bit. I don't just treat the body, I provide spiritual mentorship, somatic healing, nervous system regulation. I even have a couple clients who are learning the art and business of speaking with me because I've been rigorously pursuing public speaking for the last three years. I didn't have a sense that I was gonna open a space ever again. And my husband has this client, my husband works in the car industry, and he's a guy in his mid-40s, his family owns a ton of real estate in Thousand Oaks, and with enough enough convincing, I got him to come in to give him a free fitness and wellness assessment. That is always a surefire way to at least let someone know what I do and how my work is different than the work they've probably experienced, at least as it pertains to physical therapy. So he comes in, I give him an assessment, it's extremely thorough. I tell him what I think is happening, and based on what he tells me, he wants for his body and his life and his nutrition, the roadmap of how I can get him there. And he goes, All right, I'm signing up. So now my husband's client becomes my client. About a month into working with him, this is all in the last few months, you guys. This is extremely current. He comes into my home office and just starts gibber jabbering. And it's making no sense, by the way. He goes, Ah, I want to tell you something, but I don't know. I don't know if I should. I'm already doing business with your husband, and now I'm working with you, and I can't be in bed with both of you. And I was like, What are you talking about? And he said, I have this space. I have this space. And the tenants are leaving. It is zoned for everything that you do. There's no hoops to jump through, there's no permits you need to get. And I just thought of you. Maybe you want it, maybe you want to have a space again. I don't know. But, and I was like, well, let me see it. That was my first response. Let me go see it. Not, no, I'm not really doing that right now. You know, quick decisions. Quick decisions as an entrepreneur. Even if you mess up, even if you make the wrong one, they're a hallmark of entrepreneurship. And that was a pretty easy decision, right? I wasn't saying yes right away, I was just saying let me go see it. And the place was unbelievable. It was so big. It's bigger than any space. I've had multiple spaces in, not at the same time, but in Santa Monica where I worked, I moved out of the little apartment that I was first in into multiple different spaces due to landlord situations, building construction. No space I've ever had has been bigger than 1,500 square feet. And this space in Thousand Oaks is 2,500. And it's broken up into three rooms. Of course, you can design a place however you want. It certainly needed an aesthetic makeover, but it was so easy to walk into and see its potential. And I thought, okay, yes, I'm interested. Now I need to do what is out of my nature, and I need to sit with it. Because I love to say yes before thinking it through. I am a yes woman, and I've learned over the years that with big decisions, especially, I sleep on them before I say anything for at least 24 hours. In this case, it was going to be much longer than that. But my only job after seeing the space was to sit with it and really notice what's happening to me as I imagine the possibility, all the stress, all the excitement, and everything in between that comes along with opening up a business space. I had to sit with the vision of what it would be. Okay, you know you could do what you did before and make a certain amount of money, and then there's a ceiling to that. You already know how to get one-on-one clients, create retention, build rapport. You can certainly do all of that with the body, that's what your doctorate is in. Okay, but is that what this is? And if it isn't, what what is this space? What do you want it to be? How are you gonna get it to reflect the woman you have become? In all these years sober, after the loss of your sister, after the release of your book, after the speaking on stages to hundreds of people about emotional resilience and overcoming adversity and solving the connection crisis. What do you want this space to be? And then I had to start dreaming it up. And it's not gonna be easy, and it is not going to happen quickly. But what I want the space to be is not a gym, not another fitness studio, which are all over Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks, not another wellness facility where you can get an Ivy drip, sit in an infrared sauna or a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and feel better. Those exist already. I want this to be a sanctuary, a hub, a piece of connected tissue that binds us together as a community. I want people to come into the space and have movement, nervous system regulation, and identity-level healing. And that means that the services need to reflect that. The vision of what this space is going to become, is massive. It will require eventually a manager and a bunch of employees, and most likely an assistant that is not just ChatGPT. But my husband, who's had a successful business for 13 years, also used to be in investment banking and he used to build business models for a living, and we sat down and we built the model. And at first it had other people renting the space for me again as a way to offset my overhead, and he just stopped and said, You've done this already. And by the end, in case you forgot, you didn't really like it. What would be a version of this business that was so successful, that was scalable, that was all yours, that was really you and your brand. And we started to build it out. And of course, a business model is a living, breathing organism. It's got to move and change, right? As I get to know people and hear what they really need. But I'm gonna start slow. I have about eight private clients right now. The goal in year one is to get to 20, 20 one-on-one clients. This is high-touch care that can range from physical, psychological, emotional, mental healing, and coaching. I'm gonna host my Heart Conscious Creators event at my space now, but spread it out quarterly. So my first one is on the grand opening of the space, March 21st. If you're local, please come by from 12 to 3 p.m. I'm gonna have free monthly meetups where I just have a soulful circle and we gather together and we do a Q ⁇ A and we talk about what's on our hearts. And I'm gonna have workshops also spread out through the year. Four weeks in duration, where I actually teach people things like the anatomy of yoga. Because you could go anywhere where we live and take yoga, but is it custom fit for your body in your history of injury? Are they modifying yoga to fit the science of what we know is best for the body? Not really. Yoga is an ancient tradition, but how do you practice yoga in a way that your body feels great, where you can practice yoga for as long as humanly possible without getting hurt? All these ideas I've had, I get to implement. So there'll be a trickling out of some of these other things in year one, but mostly just getting to 20 people. And then, as word spreads, we'll add more. I want it to be a place that's immersive and experiential. I want to solve the connection crisis. I don't just want to be another wellness center in a wealthy suburb. I want people to leave differently than when they came. I want them to have real tools that are gonna change the course of their lives, whether it's tools about how they move their body, tools about regulating their nervous system, tools about reframing the stories that have been on repeat, that are keeping them stuck in suffering. I want to help people rise to their full potential. I want to bring back laughter and joy. What a concept. This is gonna take time. It's a big vision. Thousand Oaks has a hundred thousand people in it, and most of them don't know who I am, most of them don't know what strong heart fitness is, and they're gonna drive by and they're gonna see the sign and go, huh, there's a lot of work to do. But I've never felt more committed to staying with myself through this journey. Not just getting comfortable when it's good enough, but growing, evolving, getting in the trenches with people, really finding out what they need, getting creative about marketing, getting to know what's on people's hearts, and giving them what they want. I don't just want customers, I want screaming fans. I want people to go, holy cow, I've never. I've never had an experience like that. I have never had somebody get to the root of the problem with so much compassion and actually have me leave here with things I can do right now, today, that are gonna change my life. I've never had that happen. I want to be that person. I want to be that facility. So strong heart fitness is reopening. The build-out is underway. And I actually, before shooting this podcast, took my first client into the space. It really wasn't ready for her to be there. There's still dust, they're still finishing up paint touch-ups, they still have to do the bathrooms. And I told her that. She wanted to see it. And it was so incredible. When I sat with the vision of this, what happened was it swelled up inside of me. The feeling of wanting to give this a go swelled up and grew like a flower blooming in the springtime. That's how it felt. And I knew it was right. And I just fell in my lap. And I love to think of these moments as God shots. Whatever God means to you. The universe just handing me something and going, it's time. And I am ready. I am ready and willing to accept the challenge of this and to provide people with access to care and a level of healing that is so desperately needed. And if I can play any part in that, in somebody's life, then I'm doing God's work. So you heard it here first. And I will have so much more to share with you in the weeks to come. But that is all for today. And I hope it inspires you to notice what comes to you with ease, to sit with something big before you respond, and to honor the call. Honor the call of your knowing. Charge in the direction of your destiny. And just keep trusting yourself.