Heather Gansel built Ask Doctor Heather around a simple idea: athletes should understand why their bodies hurt, not just how to temporarily relieve the pain.
As a movement specialist and performance educator, Heather helps athletes and active adults identify movement imbalances, address recurring pain, and build more resilient bodies through virtual coaching, corrective programming, and education.
That education-first approach extends well beyond her client sessions. Heather shares movement, injury prevention, and performance content across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook, helping people understand their bodies while building trust with potential clients.
The challenge is producing enough.
"If I'm trying to push out almost 42 pieces of content per week, there's no way between my full-time job, trying to see clients, and doing all these things that I'm going to be able to set aside time to bulk video," Heather said.
With HeyGen, she doesn't have to.
Turning one photo into a consistent video presence
Creating polished video used to mean getting camera-ready, finding time to film, writing scripts, and sending footage to a video editor.
Heather discovered HeyGen after watching another creator demonstrate an AI avatar. She was struck by how difficult it was to distinguish the AI version from the real person and decided to experiment with it herself.
She started with a static photo and provided video clips so HeyGen could recreate her voice and movements.
"I was very impressed with how it animated my entire self," Heather said. "It had my actual voice, which I really like too. I was like, okay, this is really cool."
Heather now uses her avatar for talking-head videos and can add B-roll, exercises, captions, and other visual elements without filming every piece herself.
Creating days of content in under an hour
Heather has built HeyGen into a broader AI-powered content workflow.
She uses Claude to analyze existing content, identify topics and keywords, and help write scripts. She then brings those scripts into HeyGen to quickly turn them into videos.
"Within less than an hour, I can have almost three days' worth of content already set, scheduled, and ready to go," Heather said.
That speed makes a demanding publishing schedule possible. Heather has increased her Instagram cadence from one morning Reel to as many as three Reels throughout the day, organizing content around weekly themes such as lower back pain.
She still films herself for demonstrations where showing a precise technique matters. HeyGen handles more of the educational talking-head content that fills out the rest of her calendar.
And Heather hasn't seen engagement drops when her avatar takes her place.
"It doesn't matter if it's HeyGen or me personally," she said.
Heather says no one has called out the videos as AI-generated, and friends she's shown them to have been surprised to learn they weren't actually filmed.
"They're like, wow, this is really impressive. Would never have known it's not you unless you told me it wasn't you," Heather said.
Building trust before the first conversation
For Heather, more content isn't simply about filling a social calendar. It's how potential clients know her expertise before deciding whether to work with her.
Her YouTube channel is already a major source of demand. Heather estimates that nearly 50% of her leads come from YouTube, often after people have watched multiple educational videos.
"They've absorbed quite a few videos," Heather said. "They go, okay, she definitely knows her stuff. She's educating. Then they reach out."
Consistent video gives Heather more opportunities to explain movement patterns, address misconceptions, offer injury-prevention advice, and help athletes understand their bodies before they ever speak with her.
HeyGen makes it possible to create those touchpoints without taking time away from existing clients.
Producing more without paying per video
HeyGen has also changed the economics of Heather's content production.
Previously, she worked with a professional video editor who charged roughly $175 to more than $200 for a single video. Heather still provided the script, storyboard direction, B-roll suggestions, and other creative inputs before the editor assembled the final product.
At that price, producing the volume she wanted wasn't practical.
With HeyGen, she says the cost is "a fraction still of what I was paying just to have a video editor."
Now she can produce educational content at the volume her strategy demands while keeping her voice, appearance, brand, and messaging consistent.
Next, Heather wants to take the same workflow beyond short-form social content into ads and longer YouTube videos. Longer term, she sees an even bigger opportunity: making more of her expertise accessible to people who may not be able to work with her one-on-one.
For Heather, that's the promise of scaling her knowledge without stretching her schedule further.
"You can't see everybody," she said.
