This Physio Company Put Its Clinics Inside Other People's Gyms

Seattle Fitness Magazine · 19 Sep 2026

• 7seattle-area clinics
• 4clinics inside gyms
• ~5kbelltown shared sq ft

Direct access, no doctor required

Washington does not require a referral to start physical therapy.

HIDEF calls the arrangement direct access on its own site: no doctor's referral needed before a first visit in Washington State. The rule traces to 1991, written into state law as RCW 18.74.012, and the version Washington passed is unrestricted. There is no cap on visits, no time restriction, and no diagnosis a patient has to clear before a therapist is allowed to evaluate and treat them.

HIDEF Physical Therapy built its business inside that law, and its Seattle clinic sits at 2211 5th Ave in Belltown, on the floor of a working gym. Four of the company's seven Seattle-area locations share space with a partner gym, and Belltown was the first of the four.

A gym floor at 5th and Blanchard

The Belltown clinic sits inside Felix Athletics at the corner of 5th Avenue and Blanchard Street, sharing roughly 5,000 square feet of gym space.

Felix describes its own floor plainly: a well-equipped space, no mirrors, no egos. Patients here "benefit from the gym's equipment for rehabilitation and training purposes." HIDEF describes it as enough to take someone "from day one after injury all the way to 100% and far beyond."

That is the company's own language for it. The arrangement it describes is a rehab appointment that happens on a gym floor rather than in a treatment room. That is the bet. One block down the same street, at 2310 5th Ave, Orangetheory Fitness runs its own studio.

The gym that stopped waving the flag

For twelve years the gym on this floor called itself CrossFit Felix.

It does not any more. The website crossfitfelix.com now returns a permanent redirect to felixathletics.com: same address, same owner, same floor. Felix's own copy calls itself one of the original CrossFit affiliates in downtown Seattle, open for over a decade, and explains the change plainly: "After 12 years as a CrossFit affiliate, we continue to deliver the same thoughtful programming, dedicated coaching, and supportive community, just under a new name." The gym adds, "We just don't wave the flag anymore.

Not because we're out on CrossFit. But because we're not married to labels." HIDEF's own website has not caught up. Its location pages still describe the Belltown clinic as sitting "inside of CrossFit Felix," a name the gym itself retired. Felix Athletics, meanwhile, lists physical therapy among its own current services and links straight back to hidefpt.com, so the partnership is live and only the signage on one side of it is stale.

Four of seven, by design

HIDEF now runs seven clinics around the Seattle area, and four of them sit on somebody else's gym floor.

Belltown is inside Felix Athletics on 5th Ave. Renton, at 332 Burnett Ave S, operates inside Vigor Ground Fitness and Performance. Covington, out at 17709 SE 272nd St, sits inside Club Ignite Fitness. West Seattle, at 2222 California Ave SW, occupies space in an Anytime Fitness under a partnership HIDEF says combines "high level strength and conditioning with elite sports physical therapy."

The other three keep their own front doors: Bellevue at 13112 NE 20th St, Issaquah at 8180 304th Ave SE, and Redmond at 6825 176th Ave NE. The pattern goes back to how the company started. Its first Seattle clinic opened in 2019 inside Pandora Fitness, a gym floor from day one, and later moved into the Belltown space it still occupies. A standalone address did not arrive until Bellevue, in August 2021.

Not the only ones

HIDEF is not the only physical therapy practice in Seattle working out of a gym.

Forefront Physical Therapy does the same thing at Flow Fitness in South Lake Union, 311 Terry Ave N, where Flow members get a complimentary 20-minute assessment through the partnership. That makes two operators running the model in the city proper, one of them four times over across the wider metro. Everybody else checked keeps their own address. Magnolia Physical Therapy, Alpine Physical Therapy and Seattle's Elite Physical Therapy are all standalone.

So is Avant Physical Therapy, which sits in the same Belltown district as HIDEF's clinic, at 2901 3rd Ave, a few blocks and an entirely different premise away. Five practices is a sample, not a census, and nobody has counted every physical therapist in Seattle. What the sample shows is that the gym-floor clinic is uncommon here without being unique.

Booking a session

The Belltown clinic keeps its own hours, separate from the gym around it: Monday through Friday, 7am to 7pm, closed weekends.

Felix Athletics runs longer, open weekdays from 6am to 8:30pm, plus Saturday 8 to 11am and Sunday 9 to 11am, so the two schedules overlap for roughly twelve hours a day during the week. A session runs 45 minutes to an hour, and HIDEF's site frames it as one-to-one care with a provider present the whole time. HIDEF takes most major Washington insurance plans.

It also sells cash-pay single sessions and packages for anyone who would rather skip a claim, and it offers a free injury screen before anyone commits to a plan or a card. Sessions qualify for HSA and FSA spending either way.