Christie Whitehead

There are physios who do dry needling. And then there are physios who teach it to other physios, examine candidates on it, and treat the kind of complex presentations that most practitioners would refer on. Christie Whitehead is firmly in the second category — and if precise, advanced dry needling is what you need, you won’t find better hands in the Sydney CBD.

Christie joins City Physio & Pilates from New Zealand, where she built a clinical career that sits at the intersection of elite sport, advanced manual therapy, and a genuine passion for the kind of complex, multifactorial presentations that require both technical skill and creative clinical thinking. Her background in applied fitness and sports science is not an afterthought — it shapes how she understands load, athletic capacity, and the gap between recovering from injury and performing at the level you were at before it.

The dry needling piece — and why it matters who holds the needle

Dry needling has become sufficiently mainstream that most physiotherapy clinics now offer it. What varies enormously is the depth of competence behind the offering. A two-day introductory course and a listing on a website is not the same as completing foundation, upper limb advanced, and lower limb advanced training — and it is certainly not the same as being appointed as an Examiner and Clinical Educator for the PAANZ Dry Needling Course in New Zealand.

Christie holds that appointment. She has assessed other practitioners’ needling competency. She has trained clinicians in the technique. She has completed the full PAANZ progression — Foundation, Upper Limb Advanced, and Lower Limb Advanced — which means her needling is not limited to the superficial and obvious targets but extends to the deep segmental, neurovascular, and myofascial structures that require advanced anatomical knowledge and precise needle placement to reach safely and effectively.

For patients who have had dry needling elsewhere and found it underwhelming, or who present with pain patterns that haven’t responded to standard approaches, Christie’s level of needling expertise represents a genuinely different clinical offering that comes from having trained, examined, and taught in this modality at the highest level available in Australasia.

Elite sport, endurance, and the athlete who needs more than rest

Christie’s sporting background runs deep. She has served as Head Physiotherapist for four New Zealand national teams at Underwater Hockey Age Group World Championships — a role that requires managing acute injury in a high-stakes, time-critical environment where the margin for error is narrow and the pressure to get the call right is significant. She has also worked as physiotherapist for club, Auckland, and school representative Underwater Hockey teams across multiple seasons.

This on-field, high-performance experience translates directly into how she manages the athletes who walk through the door at City Physio. She understands training blocks, competition calendars, and the real-world constraints of an athlete who cannot simply rest for six weeks. She knows how to modify load without destroying fitness, how to return someone to sport without increasing re-injury risk, and how to have the honest conversation about what the body can and can’t do right now.

Her clinical interest in long distance runners and triathletes is backed by a genuine understanding of multi-sport load — the cumulative demands of swim, bike, and run on the same musculoskeletal system, and the specific injury patterns that emerge when volume increases or balance between disciplines shifts. For Hyrox competitors, CrossFit athletes, ultra-distance runners, and competitive cyclists, Christie brings a level of sport-specific literacy that makes her assessments considerably more useful than a generic sports physio consultation.

Postpartum return to sport — done properly

Return to sport after pregnancy and childbirth is one of the most underserved areas in physiotherapy. The generic advice — wait six weeks, listen to your body — is not a clinical protocol. It takes no account of the specific tissue changes of pregnancy, the biomechanical demands of the sport being returned to, pelvic floor recovery, load management, or the significant variation in individual timelines.

Christie’s fitness and sports science background, combined with her clinical physiotherapy training, positions her to manage postpartum return to sport with the specificity it deserves. Whether the goal is returning to running, completing a Hyrox, getting back to cycling, or returning to a competitive sport, the program is built around objective assessment of readiness — not a calendar date.

Areas Christie treats

Qualifications and continuing professional development

Frequently asked questions

Related reading:

Dry Needling at City Physio & Pilates — what dry needling is, how it works, and what to expect from your appointment.

What is Dry Needling? — a plain-language guide to the technique and the evidence behind it.

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