Lead contributor
Dr. Matthew Zanis
PT, DPT, FAAOMPT, OCS, ATC, CSCS
From Olympic arenas to Navy Special Warfare. From MLB clubhouses to the desert trails of Scottsdale, over a decade building the bridge between rehabilitation and peak human performance.
Dr. Matthew Zanis is a Duke-trained doctor of physical therapy, an orthopedic specialist, and a fellowship-trained manual therapist. He earned his athletic-training degree at the University of Pittsburgh and his DPT at Duke, then completed an orthopedic residency and a manual-therapy fellowship through the American Academy of Orthopedic Manual Physical Therapists, the FAAOMPT credential. He is also a published researcher in the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy.
Across fifteen years he has worked at nearly every level of elite performance: Division-I athletics, Major League Baseball, the NFL, the PGA Tour, the U.S. military including Navy Special Warfare, and USA Shooting within the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic movement. He is a Block One coach with Power Athlete and the founder of Rooted in MVMNT, his Scottsdale-based performance practice.
He is the lead contributor to this project because his lens is the one this site is built on: rehabilitation and training for performance are the same thing, the body is one connected system, and what you put into it has to earn its place behind movement, sleep, and nutrition, not in front of them.
His method, the five pillars of Rooted in MVMNT
Quality of movement comes before load. You earn the right to add weight.
Energy systems, sleep, recovery, nervous-system regulation. You can't train hard depleted.
Confidence and ownership, you can fix your own body, with a guide who shows you how.
Fuel matches the work. No training plan survives bad nutrition.
Progressive overload plus movement quality plus real recovery. Capacity built deliberately, not chased.
Pedigree
Body of work
- Co-author, “Injury risk is altered by previous injury”. International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy (2014).
- Twelve published articles for Power Athlete HQ on tendon health, rehab-to-performance, and the kinetic chain.
- A regular guest on Power Athlete Radio and ~18 performance podcasts; host of the Rooted in MVMNT podcast.
- A decade supporting Olympic-level shooting athletes, including world-champion and Olympic-medal competitors.
Why he anchors this site
In his own practice, peptides and hormone optimization sit inside a movement-first, data-driven system, considered only after sleep, nutrition, training, and recovery are handled, and only when bloodwork justifies it. That systems-first, evidence-led posture is exactly why he anchors an honest peptide resource: he treats them as one tool, never the foundation.
Find Matt
Dr. Zanis is a contributor to Ground Truth Peptides, this is not his website. His pedigree is drawn from public record; affiliations are his own and do not imply any organization's endorsement of this site.