Supporting Champions

This week’s guest is Laurence Halsted. Laurence is a former Olympic fencer, having competed at the London and Rio Olympics. Laurence retired after the Rio Olympics and is currently Performance Director of Danish Fencing.    Since retiring as an athlete Laurence has been supporting athletes in a bold new way to support the whole athlete, through holistic thinking, mentoring, developing self-awarene...

Martin Yelling is a former international runner, duathlete and ironman athlete and since retiring has, along with his partner Liz Yelling coached 1000s of athletes, and everyday folks to marathon and endurance achievements. Recently, Martin has set about creating a charitable organisation called Stormbreak. They have a purpose to; “... improve children’s mental health through movement, equipping t...

Duff Gibson won the Olympic gold medal in bob skeleton at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics. He did so at the age of 39. Duff has an incredible story to tell about trying and trying again, testing himself in several different sports, in the pursuit of finding the one that would suit him and allow him to take a shot at being an olympian. Duff shares that exploration and with it the clear analysis of w...

Dan Bigham is an athlete of the highest order, principally in the disciplines of individual and team pursuit with multiple national and World cup titles. Recently Dan is taking a pop at Bradley Wiggins’ hour record too. But Dan has achieved this level of performance with a band of brothers who congregated together and plied their collective physical talents with a mindset of simply trying to ‘work...

Sir Steve Redgrave and Sir Matthew Pinsent are as successful a sporting duo as you’ll ever meet. Steve has won 5 gold medals at 5 successive games and is a 9 time world champion, Matt has won 4 Olympic golds and 10 world championships.  They were successful before Britain became good at sport, winning before the UK Olympic system grew sophisticated. But not just the occasional win - sustained and...

In this week’s conversation I speak to Martin Buchheitt and George Perry authors of their upcoming book “Egoals” (a blend of Ego and goals), the subtitle being, “Exercising your ego in high-performance environments”. Martin has been a real leader in applied sports science and research particularly in team sports and George is a track coach and writer based in the US. They’ve teamed up to explore t...

This week I spoke to Mike Hughes. Mike is a Performance Analyst, having worked with some of the best teams in the world and developed them by providing understanding and insight based on deconstructing and exploring phenomena in training and performance. Mike and I worked alongside each other at the English institute of Sport, though on different teams, Mike worked with British cycling in the year...

Mandy Hickson on jet fighter pilot performance   This week I spoke to Mandy Hickson. Mandy is a fighter pilot, having joined the Royal Air Force in 1994 and flew the Tornado GR4 on the front line, where she operated in hostile environments, including patrolling the ‘No Fly’ zone over Iraq. I was fascinated to discuss with Mandy about the physical and mental challenges of training to become a top f...

This week I spoke to Steph Houghton. Steph is the England Football Captain, having played for her country over 120 times. Steph has seen the women’s game evolve from amateur days, to the rise in popularity of the game in Britain and around the world, to the Women’s Super League and now the women’s game selling out stadia. During this time Steph has also had to evolve, adapt & respond to growing pr...

This week’s guest is Cody Royle. Cody is the head coach of Australian Football League Team Canada, the men's national program for Australian Rules football. Cody is also an author and I would say fast becoming recognised as a pioneering voice about a topic that previously just hasn’t been communicated - that is the reality of being a head coach. In his recent book, The Tough Stuff, he explores the...

David Martin is a leading light in applied sports science. He was senior physiologist at the Australian Institute of Sport, where along with a number of brilliant minds, pioneered the application of science to elite performance. During the 1990s, as I was grappling with some fundamentals, David was breaking new ground and frankly doing work that the world hadn’t seen before. Their work was the ben...

This week I speak to Kevin Dutton Professor of Psychology at Oxford University, who specialises in psychopaths. Kevin has written several books on the topic, for example The Wisdom of Psychopaths, Flipnosis, The Good Psychopaths Guide to Success and his recent book, Black and White Thinking all of which are illuminating because they unveil a world that is for many of us so alien, so peculiar, so g...

This week’s guest is Chris Thompson, who at the age of 39 has qualified for the Tokyo Olympic marathon for Team GB. 'Thommo' as he is known didn’t suddenly spring to the top in a freak qualification, he has been knocking on the door for 20 years , keeping going, persisting, persevering, through a career full of challenges. Thommo crossed the line a Kew Garden’s in the qualification event with an o...

This week’s guest is Alistair Brownlee. Alistair is a two time Olympic Champion, four time World and four time European Champion amongst many other honours in triathlon. But quite simply Alistair is one of the greatest racers in the history of the sport and probably across any sport in his generation.  After the Rio Olympics Alistair began racing over half and then full ironman triathlon distance....

Applied Performance Practitioner SKILLS Programme - COURSES ANNOUNCED I’m delighted to share with you details of the upcoming Applied Professional Practitioner Skills Programme. Bookings are open NOW and full details are here. Here I explain what the course is, who it's for, how it's unique (spoiler - it's applied in focus), everything you need to know.   0:00 Introduction 2:20 What the courses ar...

This week’s guest is Glyn Howatson, Professor of Human & Applied Physiology at Northumbria University. Glyn’s specialist subject is recovery but its recovery with a purpose and that is to optimise neuromuscular adaptation. I spoke to Glyn to try to cut through some of the noise, make sense of an area that has to all intents and purposes exploded in interest over the last few decades. As you’ll hea...

This week’s guest is Harvard University Professor of Biological Sciences, Dan Lieberman. If you’ve heard of Dan it will probably be in connection with his work around whether we are born to run, i.e. that a number of specific evolutionary adaptations that we as a species have acquired over time have enabled us to be really rather good at running for long distances. This hinted that our survival wa...

This week’s guest is Ama Agbeze, former England Netball captain. Ama Led the team to perhaps the England Teams's greatest success, winning the Commonwealth Gold medal. I was keen to ask Ama about her leadership of the team, what was different in the lead up, the preparation and in the moments of performing under the pressure of playing the hosts in 2018. I was also intrigued by Ama’s own individua...

In this episode I speak to Alan Murchison. Alan currently runs a business called the Performance Chef, providing support to a host of sports, teams and executives in providing their food, their fuel and flavours. Alan does this from a unique stand point of credibility as he is a chef, a Michelin starred chef - in fact in his heyday he ran the 10 in 8 Fine Dining Group, where he oversaw four Michel...

This week I spoke to Dan Cable. Dan is a Professor Organisational Behaviour at London Business School specialising in research and teaching focus on change, organisational culture, leadership mindset. Dan has a new book out called Exceptional, which I must admit was my favourite read of 2020. You might assume from the title and from Dan’s background that the book is about aspiring, goals, striving...

This week I speak with Lizzy Yarnold. Lizzy is double Olympic Champion in that chilled out sporting event Bob Skeleton. Lizzy was spotted through a talent identification scheme, selected to be part of the development team for skeleton racing and rose to competitive on the world stage, World Cup winner and took the Olympic gold in Sochi in 2014. Lizzy discusses the journey towards that gold, how sh...

This week’s guest is Stuart Worden, Principal of the Brit School. The BRIT (British Record Industry Trust) School is a performing arts and technology school in Croydon, South London and free to attend. But this is no ordinary performing arts school. The alumni read like a who’s who of music, dance, film and production; Singers - Adele, The Feeling, Leona Lewis, Katie Melua, Jessie J,  Actors - Cus...

This week’s guest is Professor Mark Williams who has spent his professional career understanding the neural and psychological aspects of acquiring skills and developing expertise. Mark has recently published a fascinating book called “The Best”. The subtitle of the book captures your attention though, “How elite athlete are made”. Now you might starting jumping to conclusions that the book tends t...

This week we have two guests, Mark Richardson and Marcus Smith. Mark Richardson is the drummer for the band Skunk Anansie, a band that were figureheads of the Britrock explosion in the mid-nineties, with defining songs Weak and Hedonism and remain a highly influential band 25 years since they were formed. Dr Marcus Smith is Reader in Sport and Exercise Physiology at the University of Chichester, w...

This week’s guest is Peter Vint. I’d got in touch with Peter with the full intention of discussing analytics, and the trend towards data and to fully explore the wave of interest, activity and investment in capture, understanding and use of information – and we do explore this especially as he has directed and delivered this function at the highest level at the USOC and in the Ineos sub 2 hour mar...