[Steve House]

Pete Dickinson, MPT, SCS, is a physical therapist who specializes in working with high-level endurance athletes. His distinguished career has sent him around the globe on behalf of the US Ski & Snowboard Team and several professional cycling organizations. His primary aim as a practitioner is to get his patients back to training and activity via the most direct path available.

Pete grew up in an active family in the Midwest, where early on he came to appreciate the value of physical fitness. After receiving his master’s in physical therapy from the University of Indianapolis in 1988, he headed west, bouncing from mountain town to mountain town before finally settling in Washington’s Methow Valley with his wife, Janice, and their two children. The couple founded Winthrop Physical Therapy in 1998, which they soon expanded to include a gym centered on strength training.

Pete has been a physical therapist for US Ski & Snowboard since 1992, when he tended to the Alpine Team while living in Park City, Utah. Once he moved to the Methow Valley, a hotbed for Nordic skiing, he transitioned to working more closely with the Cross-Country Team. Today he continues to aid that team as well as members of US Biathlon and the Vermont-based Green Racing Project. He travels on the international World Cup circuit, supporting these elite endurance athletes through injury treatment and recovery. On the cycling side, he has assisted the Irish national team and a road biking club in Annecy, France. He lectures abroad and across the United States in advanced sports therapy techniques.

When not on the road, Pete continues to practice and teach fitness classes for Winthrop PT. He and Janice transferred the business to new owners in 2014, but the couple has remained involved in the practice, which caters to the high-demand active patient and encompasses post-surgery rehab, recovery from orthopedic injuries, and concussion management. In recent years, Pete has honed techniques for treating patients online—approaches that can reduce the initial delay in providing treatment and make it easy to ensure follow-up care.

High-level athletes and other active individuals can be some of the worst and best patients: bad in that they tend to be extremely motivated and impatient to return to training; good in that they are extremely motivated, already quite fit, and familiar with the movements involved in treatment. Pete is skilled at harnessing this restless energy and channeling it toward productive recovery through an individualized plan of care. Central to this is education: By teaching his patients why they are doing an activity and at what pace, Pete is able to encourage them to stick to the optimal comeback path. The idea is to maximize what an athlete can do—to avoid undertraining—without over-stressing an injured region. He knows the mistakes that can be made and how to avoid them.

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[TerryLui]

TerryLui on February 22, 2019 at 3:10 pm #16942

Welcome Pete!! The UA team just keeps getting better and better! 🙂