By John Portch

“Leading into Rio, I could have counted on one hand the amount of mistakes that Max made on the pommel,” says Scott Hann, the Head Coach of three-time Olympic champion Max Whitlock.

“However, leading into Tokyo, I could have counted on one hand the amount of clean routines Max did. They were polar opposites.”

Hann is smiling as he tells this tale to the Leaders Performance Institute, because both Games proved to be a success for Whitlock.

In 2016, in Rio, he claimed gold in both the floor exercise and the pommel horse, while also earning a bronze in the men’s all-around event. Five years later, in Tokyo, Whitlock retained his gold on the pommel horse.

Those four medals go alongside the two bronzes Whitlock won in the team and pommel horse at the London 2012 Games.

Whitlock has been on the senior men’s scene for more than a decade and recently stated his desire to compete at the Paris 2024 Olympics – a decision Hann discussed during his recent appearance on the Leaders Performance Podcast – and that journey has seen him develop from a talented youth to a seasoned champion.

Whitlock’s body and mind have developed with each Olympic cycle.

“I have to do things completely different with Max,” says Hann, building on his earlier point. “And I have to accept that the small successes on the way are going to be different.”

The contrast between Whitlock’s preparations for the 2016 and the delayed 2020 Games were almost besides the point. Hann adds: “I had to have the confidence in that programme, even though there were struggles and adaptions, I had to have the confidence that what we were doing was right because that gave Max the confidence to trust the process.”

The Leaders Performance Institute has asked Hann about his relationship with data; how he uses it and any preferences he has as a head coach.

Says Hann: “There’s two sets of data that I think about: what repetitions need to be done to perform for a competition or to achieve a skill and, of course, the data that you gain from competitions in terms of scorings, deductions etc.

“Over the years, you do multiple preparations before a competition so you get a guide of what numbers you need to be doing; but you need to be able to adapt at every single different preparation because there might be a small injury, there might be different level gymnasts, you might have an older gymnast now.”

Video analysis is a regular feature of Hann and Whitlock’s training routine thanks to British Gymnastics’ relationship with the UK Sports Institute. “We’re doing that all the time, but you don’t realise you’re doing it because it’s usually on your mobile phones,” says Hann. “They’re so advanced these days. But we do have a great analyst at British Gymnastics so that when we can access her data it’s really useful and she’ll pull together all of the different scores and all the different starter scores so that we can take that and pitch where we want the routines to be at and it helps you develop and choose a team as well, if you’ve got all that data.”

Gymnastics is a discipline where Hann’s coaching intuition necessarily comes to the fore. “Once you’ve got your fundamentals in place, you adapt along the way using your coaching intuition and those small nuances of what you see because it’s not a timed sport. It’s not running, it’s not a strength sport, it is so intricate, with so many little details.

“If you think about it, on the men’s side of the programme, you’ve got six different apparatuses, six different events, and in an event, in a routine you do ten different skills, but to develop that, each skill you could have ten different techniques depending on ten different body shapes of athlete to learn that skill.

“Then you’ve got the strength & conditioning, the physical preparation, the mental preparation, the flexibility, all of those things that go into preparing all of those different skills, and then you’ve got to practise them individually, in combinations, and in routines to build that robustness and that physical preparedness to be able to do a full routine.

“Then, of course, you’ve got to do the numbers of a full routine to make sure that they’re prepared. There’s so many things that go into preparing an athlete that you can’t just have a bit of data that tells you how to do it. You should have a guideline of what works and then build on that.”

In Hann’s case, he uses all available sources of information to inform his judgments and overcome his inherent biases.

“In terms of the data from the competition, it’s important to look at where those deductions are because sometimes as a coach you do look at things through rose-tinted spectacles,” he says. “I’ve been guilty of that lots of times. ‘Where on earth did you get those deductions from?’.”

In the pommel horse, routines are scored by two judging panels. One begins with a score of zero and adds points for requirements, difficulty and connections. The second panel has a score starting at 10.0 and subsequently deducts points for errors. The difficulty and execution scores are then combined for a gymnast’s overall score.

“It’s important that you understand those deductions because you have to bring that into your training and make those small changes along the way. So the more data you get from that, the better.”

Injury prevention is another area of intense focus for Hann and British Gymnastics. “I haven’t had to do this with Max – touch wood – but identifying where common injuries occur and look at data to help avoid or mitigate those potential injuries. At British Gymnastics at the moment, they’re doing a lot of work on loading and trying to come with policies and guidelines to make sure that we’re avoiding or at least doing as much as we can to avoid any potential overload or over-use injuries. Acute injuries are going to happen, that’s the nature of the sport, but any over-use injuries so that we can get the athletes to have longevity in the sport, a healthy exit of the sport when they’re ready, so they’re not being held together at the end of it and, of course, a lot of that will link into their mental health. If their body feels good then they’re going to feel good.”

The Leaders Performance Institute asks how, for example, Hann will discuss data with a strength & conditioning coach. “Again, because gymnastics isn’t doing something specific like running where a strength & conditioning coach is almost part of the front, lead coaching team, it’s almost about building a robust muscle core to help protect the body as it goes through the specifics of gymnastics. So it’s helping the strength & conditioning coach understand what those specifics are so that they can design their programmes to make sure that the gymnast is robust and safe in their training.

“That’s where that communication between everyone is key. Because they can also bring advice to you and if you’re open and able to take that advice onboard, you can reflect actually you can find new ways of doing things, but that’s the future, right?”

Listen below to the full conversation with Scott Hann:

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By Tom Friend

A fresh-faced teenager asked Brandon Ingram for his game shoes one night in March, and the New Orleans Pelicans forward answered: “Yes, but…”

Yes, the kid could have his sneakers. But… he couldn’t have the Move Insoles that were biomechanically designed based on 120,000 foot scans and tedious algorithms for stellar arch support and injury prevention.

So Ingram calmly slipped out the insoles, signed the sneakers, handed them over, received a gracious thank you and found out later the NBA had posted the whole scene on Instagram.

The video went somewhat viral, leading to this random comment underneath: “why do players take out the sole in the shoes then give them away….help me understand.”

Answer: footwear technology.

Move Insoles are an emerging product developed by credentialed pedorthists who rely on video-motion and automated gait analytics to democratize orthotics for NBA players — not to mention the general public — so they don’t have to wear more-restrictive custom inserts.

Image courtesy of Moves Insoles.

Roughly a dozen NBA teams have already acquired the insoles in bulk for their respective rosters — the Pelicans purportedly being one — but the company’s Co-Founder and Co-CEO Nate Jones wasn’t sure players such as Ingram had actually adopted the product until the video of the giveaway.

“It was an illuminating moment for us,” Jones said, who brainstormed the business after dealing with his own plantar fasciitis. “We’ve seen players pull out custom orthotics before. But for a player to hold onto our $60 insole — which is not prohibitively expensive for them, they can always order more — because they’ve broken in a pair and want to carry them on to the next game, that was a great story for us.”

Before launching the company, Jones’s goal was to produce an over-the-counter insole for younger, active athletes that was based on data and podiatry science. “I mean, you wouldn’t ever see Dr Scholls in an NBA locker room,” he says. As a long-time sports marketer working under the prominent NBA agent Aaron Goodwin, he fortuitously had access to league players and league intel — and found out which company was doing proprietary foot scans for NBA teams.

That firm was Miami-based Footcare Express, which had performed 120,000 foot scans to create an algorithm for a universal insole that would benefit about 85% of the athletic population.

Leveraging Footcare Express’ video and gait analysis and the company Mat Market’s original equipment manufacturing, Jones recruited former Director of Nike Innovation Aaron Cooper to help with the final design and implementation.

“This is 100% based on the data,” Jones says. “If you have a flatter foot, this will bring your feet into a better position. Basically, there are all kinds of biomechanical issues that could potentially get your feet off kilter: if you’ve got a flatter foot or some other potential issue. Our insoles help aid against those potential issues.”

It also helped that Jones had the perfect person to trial the insoles with: Portland Trail Blazers all-star guard Damian Lillard.

Lillard had broken his foot as a collegiate player at Weber State and had dealt with nagging plantar fasciitis during his fourth season in the NBA. Hyper-sensitive about footcare, Lillard — an Aaron Goodwin client — agreed to wear the Move Insoles during the Tokyo Olympics, which took place in 2021. He left with a gold medal and healthy feet.

Lillard invested in the product, as did fellow NBA All-Star Chris Paul, and the common refrain from both was that Move Insoles’ $60 over the counter Gameday Pro product gave them enough arch support without sacrificing “the feel” of the court.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

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By Joe Lemire

As Head of Performance at Swansea City AFC, Thomas Barnden has a wide remit that includes oversight over physical performance, sports science, sports medicine, nutrition and psychology. His works touches everything from player health to talent development and match day analysis.

Barnden arrived in June 2022 with a pedigree of analytics through his time at forward-thinking clubs like Brighton, where he spent seven years, and Manchester City, where he led an academy program. He’s well-versed in the latest innovations in soccer. Swansea, for instance, has added partners such as infrared recovery apparel marker KYMIRA, blood-flow restriction wearable Hytro, a HydroWorx training pool, cryotherapy and many standard devices such as GPS trackers.

From this perch, the biggest tidal wave coming in sports, Barnden believes, is the proliferation of artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s already a big part of player recruitment, he noted in a recent interview, and growing toward improved recommendations for training programs.

“I think we do the prediction bit quite well, but I think the future is the prescription,” Barnden said, before he continued with his boldest projection.

“The way I see it is that there will be an assistant coach — an AI or machine learning assistant coach — on the bench within three to five years,” he added. “And I know that might sound mental, but I truly believe that we could see a position like that an assistant virtual coach or an automated assistant coach on the bench. What that looks like physically, I’m not 100% sure, but it would have a capacity to communicate tactical strategies, technical strategies, recommendation of substitutes.

“I know that sounds a little bit far-fetched, but I truly believe that is kind of the way it’s going. I’m not going to say that human behavior and human connection is going to be lost because that won’t happen. But I think there’s going to be a definite need for this integration of human and AI working together. I don’t think that the human will ever be replaced. That’s not the point. It’s for the integration of human and AI to work together.”

Swansea City Head of Performance Thomas Barnden is well-versed in the latest innovations in soccer and utilizes tools from KYMIRA and Hytro for the club’s recovery. Image: Swansea City

Generative AI solutions, such as ChatGPT, have phenomenal potential, Barnden added, while noting that there “are still some limitations with it.” What becomes crucial with the influx of all this data is making sure it is understood and used by all relevant parties.

“In many organizations, there remains a consistent disconnect between the data scientist and the executive decision makers they support,” Barnden said. “There’s a significant, what I would call, ‘interpretation gap’ in a lot of clubs. Where my role comes into the forefront is being this data translator. So it’s having effective interpersonal skills, and an ability to story tell the narrative of the message to the right people.”

One area that Swansea City — competing in the second-tier Championship this season — has emphasized is mitigating travel fatigue and promoting readiness. Swansea is a port town in Wales whose opponents are primarily in England. By one accounting, the club must travel the most miles (4,965 miles) this year, about 400 more than anyone else.

Sleep and nutrition are the two cornerstones for recovery at Swansea, adding in the specialized components like compression or cryotherapy to round out the recovery, Barnden tells SBJ Tech. Image: Athena Pictures/Getty Images.

Most recently, Swansea partnered with KYMIRA, which makes compression apparel infused with Celliant materials that turn body heat into infrared energy that is said to increase local circulation and cellular oxygenation. Such physiological change can boost recovery and improve sleep and performance.

While objective assessment of its impact is challenging — there are numerous confounding variables — but Barnden said the athletes have regularly been wearing the compression leggings and socks when traveling, as well as at other times for recovery. The team has reported positive subjective feedback. And the club is playing at a high level late in the season, having won four and drawn once in its last five matches.

“The two cornerstones that we use at Swansea really for recovery are sleep and nutrition,” Barnden said. “You add the little bits around it like the blood flow, the compression garments, the hydroworks or the cryotherapy — the active recovery part. They all add the whole package to promote recovery and regeneration.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

Mark Gannon, the CEO of UK Coaching, feels that it is about time that coaches were perceived as people too.

UK Coaching is an association that connects and supports approximately 180,000 coaches from grassroots to elite level through its UK Coaching Club.

“Coaching is all about the right environment,” he tells the Leaders Performance Podcast. “So we’ve got psychologists, nutritionists, that sort of athlete support personnel that we wrap around the athlete and I think what we need to start thinking about now is that coaches are people too and how do we wrap the same sort of support, differently, around the coach?

“If you work for a financial organisation, you’ve got a head of culture or people or HR, and there’s certain things in place in your work environment. Well, that shouldn’t be any different in our sector, maybe in our sector there’s a bit of catching up to do.

“It’s twee, but people are your greatest asset and the more that we can look after people and the more we can make the environment the right environment, the more people are going to succeed.”

Ahead of UK Mental Health Awareness Week, which runs 15-19 May, Henry and John caught up with Mark, who discussed how teams and organisations can better help their coaches. He also touches upon:

• The notion that we all tread a fine line when it comes to our mental wellbeing [9:00];
• The perennial question of job security and its impact on coaches [10:30];
• UK Coaching’s work with partners to help identify changes of behaviour in coaches [18:00];
• How coaches can protect their own wellbeing [25:00].

Henry Breckenridge Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

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By John Portch

Max Whitlock, a three-time Olympic champion, spoke candidly about his mental health upon his return from the delayed 2020 Tokyo Games.

“I fell into a place, into this rut where I just lost all motivation for everything,” he told BBC Breakfast in September 2022, just weeks after retaining his Olympic title on the men’s pommel horse. “I felt sluggish every single day. I was in this place where I just didn’t want to do anything.

“I even got a blood test because I was just feeling awful every single day. The blood test came back and I was absolutely fine. I think that is what proved to me that it was all in my head.”

Whitlock, who said he felt like a “complete waste of space”, explained that his wife, Leah, was worried and he was unable to process how he felt. “A lot of people say it, talk to people, get it out it helps,” he continued. “But I think I’ve never been that person. I’ve always been the person to just keep it in and plough on through. I’ve done [that for my] whole career of almost putting a mask up.

“I think as I started to talk to Leah or started talk to my parents more and the people around me, I started to actually realise how I was feeling.”

One of the people in whom Max confided was his Head Coach, Scott Hann, who viewed himself as a sounding board rather than as a dispenser of advice.

“Making sure that you’re able to have those conversations with the athlete is important, that you’re able to have those open conversations, that you’re not there to fix, you’re there to guide,” he told the Leaders Performance Podcast last month.

“As a coach, if you’ve been that rock, that support, that guidance throughout the whole journey, you can’t all of a sudden jump into being a practitioner. So it’s important to try and encourage the athlete to reach out and make those connections with people who are going to be able to help them. Qualified good people who are able to help.

“Also just helping by giving them confidence in what they’ve achieved and where the next part of the journey can go. I think just being there is worth its weight in gold because, quite often, when the athlete is at the pinnacle of their career and they’ve achieved something, there could be a break from training. So the athlete and coach are separated. So it’s just making sure you’re there all the time and you’re giving that communication and guidance.”

When the Tokyo Games finished, Whitlock decided to take a 12-month break in which he contemplated retirement. Hann was never going to force Whitlock’s hand and, having given it some thought, Whitlock decided to return to the gym to prepare for the Paris Olympics.

Said Hann: “I know when Max spoke to me about getting back in the gym and making this next drive towards Paris, it wasn’t just a ‘yes’ from me ‘let’s do it’, it was ‘have you considered all of the obstacles, all of the challenges that are going to come your way and are you prepared for all that?’ We spoke in detail about different things that we may experience on this. So there was a big communication around ‘are you planning or working on what you’re going to do next so that you don’t fall into that situation again in the future?’ And I think they were all positive conversations and now Max is in a really strong place with a great mindset and his training is going so well.”

The Leaders Performance Institute’s Henry Breckenridge then steered the conversation towards Hann’s own mental wellbeing.

“Well, it’s interesting because, after the Rio Olympics, I’d never experienced anything like I did before,” said Hann, who recounted his experiences in 2016.

“Everything was just a whirlwind of emotions leading up to it. If you can imagine going from country to country, hotel to hotel, you’re waited on hand and foot, you’re in your own room, you’ve got your own space, you’ve got the highs of competitions, you’ve got the lows of competitions, you’ve got the pressure. You’ve got all of those things and then you get the most incredible results that you could even dream of.”

He spoke of the “euphoria” of Whitlock’s victory, which was swiftly replaced by relief. “It’s literally ‘thank god that is over and that result was what it was’ and then you get home and, all of a sudden, you’re hoovering the floor in your living room and it hit me. It was just ‘what was it all for? What’s happened?’ No one’s holding you on a pedestal, no one’s coming around and helping you with anything now. It’s done and you’re on your own. It was really hard.”

By the time the Tokyo Games came around in 2021, Hann felt better equipped to manage that post-Olympic bathos. “Knowing that that is a possibility was what helped me. And, of course, that’s not the answer you want. You don’t want someone to have to experience that low to be able to identify it in the future. But, for me, I did experience that low so I was prepared for it. So going into Tokyo, I gave myself the tools that I needed to make sure that I was ready to go on that journey, come out the other side, decompress slowly, and then go back into normal life. But I think there needs to be guidance for coaches to be able to reach out and have that support because it is such a pressurised whirlwind of emotion all the way through.

“So I think having people to talk to, having support, having mental health support, and identifying issues and being able to talk about them are all absolutely key for both the coach and the athlete and anybody else that’s involved in that journey.”

Listen below to the full conversation with Scott Hann:

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By Luke Whitworth

In a piece the Leaders Performance Institute published back in 2019 centred around Coach Wellbeing, Leeds Beckett University Professor Sergio Lara-Bercial shared that high performance sport is:

‘a high stakes environment with lots of moving pieces. There is a lot of uncertainty and it’s not a stable environment. Another problem is that high performers are few and far between and so these coaches become like nomads. There’s no getting away from those stressors – they are always going to be there – but we can do more to build coaches’ ability to deal with them, to cope with stress, to be able to reframe stressful situations, being able to look at things more as a challenge than a threat. We have to find a way to facilitate some kind of normality in what can be an abnormal lifestyle.’

This virtual roundtable, which is four years on from the article linked above, provided an opportunity for those on the call to reflect on the current state of play around coach and staff wellbeing. To help shape the conversations, three questions were asked of participants to help shape the discussions:

1. On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate the effectiveness of your organisational or departmental approaches to coach and staff wellbeing?
2. What is having the most impact and why?
3. Where do some of the gaps remain? What do we need to do to influence them?

Curious to find out what the average score out of five was from the group in relation to question one? It was 3.2 out of five. It was clear that some initiatives are having a positive impact, but there remains gaps in our approaches and environments to take these scores closer to four or five.

What’s having the most impact?

Leaning on the second question above, the group explored some of the successful stories and initiatives that are currently taking place within their organisations pertaining to the topic at hand. The consensus was that it is important to maintain momentum and evolve what is working well, just as much as identifying the gaps which require more attention.

Mental health first aid training

One environment in the discussion shared that mental health first aid training has now become a foundational part of their wellbeing programme. It has created a base level education across the board and has elevated general awareness across their environment – there is more clarity on what to look out for both individually and collectively, as well as creating a safer space to have conversations that can otherwise be difficult.

Broad and bespoke support

The point above around mental health first aid training is a text book example of an initiative numerous organisations are implementing. As part of the conversations, there were convincing points shared around the need to have core, generic deliverables complemented by bespoke initiatives. Do you have clear minimum standards around your wellbeing practices (transparency, selection policies, communication, planning and child safeguarding)? We can often think about all the bells and whistles and forget about the real fundamentals so it’s important to get this right first and foremost.

Once you have the fundamentals and broad support in place, the bespoke elements are the idea of really understanding your people and the system and, in particular, the pressure points of people, and what help we can provide them based on their contexts and needs. It’s important to be agile and flexible around your wellbeing strategy due to its subjective nature.

Effective initiatives

The group also shared some specific and creative initiatives that they felt have had an impact in their environments. A ‘digital detox’ was one – two days within the season where staff and coaches get time off without having to take it as holiday with a request for no digital communication. Staff were encouraged to engage in hobbies and activities and asked to report back, which aided some quality stories and conversations internally.

There is value in providing economic levers (with a minimum required investment) that have been mandated to bolster mental health and wellbeing activity. From the specific league who brought this to the table, teams can’t spend their allocation on anything except this; they have also created communities of practice for individuals in these roles across clubs to come together to share and learn so that they are genuinely influencing coaches, staff and players.

Finally, industry or organisational shutdowns are having a positive impact. There is an appreciation that some environments are unable to do this, but for those that have implemented this, it has been the most impactful initiative. In environments where shutdowns are difficult, it’s important leadership are role-modelling the behaviours you are asking of your people, even simple things such as taking the full allocation of annual leave.

Engaging coaches

The group discussed the importance of opportunities for coaches to increase their levels of self-awareness and understanding of self. One of the teams on the call highlighted how they ask their coaches to check-in twice a year against a framework to assess their physical and mental wellbeing, while also outlining their commitments against those.

A representative from a leading league shared that they had engaged in roundtables with coaches about their role design – in many instances, the role is designed so that coaches can’t switch off. The coaches have been asked to come up with the solutions. Often the narrative in sport is that to be a successful coach, there is a certain way to do things – being ‘character logical’ vs. just doing the role itself. Job design, contracts and schedule were the key things emphasised by the coaches.

Final thoughts

• Wellbeing isn’t a ‘sometimes’ thing, it is an everyday thing.
• It’s important to avoid assumptions and instead think about the idea of asking ‘why guess when you can know?’
• Remove judgement and begin role-modelling that through senior leaders and management.
• Have clarity and clear ‘sign posting’ of where to go when it’s needed.

Where do the gaps remain?

Shifting gears from question two to question three, the group spent time reflecting on the gaps, challenges and opportunities around this topic with the idea of walking away from the call to explore in further detail with, and provoke thought across, their respective organisations.

‘Spine alignment’

We can often see misalignment within organisations. If you don’t have a really clear understanding of wellbeing and how it’s fitting into your overall strategy from your Board and CEO to High Performance Director and Head Coach, it will be very challenging. We can’t have a situation where there are different views, approaches, language and education in siloes – everybody having an understanding that wellbeing is everybody’s right and everybody’s responsibility. The more that everybody is open about those responsibilities at a system, organisation and individual level, you start to get more clarity around wellbeing and what we actually mean by wellbeing.

Understanding needs

The group were in agreement that there is always more that can be done to better understand people’s needs, even if there is some good work being done around this – needs are constantly changing and evolving, so we need to evolve with them too. Create opportunities to get into conversations and combine this with the quantitative insight you are collating through surveys and polls.

It can be quite easy from a club or organisation perspective to create a wellbeing strategy that we think is going to be useful for everybody, but often that isn’t the case. Wellbeing needs to be individualised as everyone’s contexts are so different. How can we move away from a blanket approach and be more specific, individualised and personalised?

Making wellbeing a core competency

One organisation shared that they are looking at high performance workforces needing competency or capabilities in wellbeing in the same way we’d ask for high performance in other modalities. For coaches in particular, making wellbeing one of those core competencies was essential. They are investing in the wellbeing literacy of their young athletes who are entering the programme and demanding high wellbeing literacy from coaches who in some instances are unable to meet those requirements – the athletes are outstripping the coaches in terms of knowledge and understanding. This is leading to a cultural nexus in many environments.

Group reflections and insights

At the end of the call, attendees were asked to share a key reflection from the roundtable that they’d like to take forward:

1. Making wellbeing in high performance sport a ‘core competency’.
2. ‘Spine alignment’ – everyone has a responsibility within an organisation or department.
3. Wellbeing for coaches and staff is something that is ever needing attention and shouldn’t be a ‘sometimes’ thing. Wellbeing is everyone’s right and everyone’s responsibility.
4. How can we be better at individualising support, resources and offerings?
5. The way in which wellbeing is becoming higher on the priority list for all organisations, teams and individuals. Making sure there is real variety in deliverables to suit all and having the agility to provide those.

Main image courtesy of Hexis

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By Joe Lemire

David Dunne has worked broadly as a performance nutritionist in elite sport, helping clubs at the highest ranks of professional soccer, rugby and basketball as well as Team Europe in golf’s Ryder Cup and Olympians in disciplines ranging from fencing to canoeing.

Through that experience, Dunne saw numerous innovations aiding sport science peers as they collected data and provided insights on athletic readiness and training loads, but there was nothing comparable for his field. That realization prompted the founding of Hexis, an AI-powered personalized nutrition app.

“Although wearables had rushed ahead and people were harvesting continuous physiological data from other sources, nutrition had really lagged behind,” said Dunne, the company’s CEO. “Everything was still a tracker and calorie counter. So we decided to take some of the advancements in sports nutrition in elite sport, which were really centered around predictive nutrition and understanding how to periodize intake, according to the load and demands of the day.”

After launching publicly in Q3 last year, Hexis has attracted more than 500 paid subscribers, of which more than 10% are professional and Olympic athletes. Endurance athletes are the most represented group. In mid-April it launched an integration with Apple Health to ingest more objective data for custom meal plans and also an in-house food tracking feature that Dunne believes will improve upon what’s available at MyFitnessPal.

Users are onboarded by sharing info about their sport, lifestyle, sleep patterns, weight, body composition, typical meals and training schedule and their goals. The duration and intensity of training is considered in generating a meal plan automatically. One recently added feature, Live Energy, evaluates intake versus expenditure at a micro level.

“If, for example, this went from being a light session into a hard session, everything pretty much updates on the fly as though I was your nutritionist in your pocket and how I would manipulate things,” Dunne said.

A desktop dashboard for team nutritionists to monitor an entire roster is in development. That’s an acute need in the field, as the best nutrition plans are personalized, which necessarily requires more time and effort. Augmenting a nutritionist’s resources to be more efficient is what helped bring together two of Hexis’ co-founders in the first place.

Dunne, whose longest team stint was with the Harlequins in Premiership Rugby, and British Cycling’s lead nutritionist, Sam Impey, both did their PhD work at Liverpool John Moores University and often crossed paths at industry events.

“Whenever we’d catch up, normally over a beer at a conference, and it was quite weird how often we’d see similarities in the challenges that we faced, even though [cycling and rugby are] dramatically different sports — but the issues of nutrition around scalability,” Impey said.

Their sub-disciplines within performance nutrition were different — Impey focused on carbohydrate periodization and physiological changes to the muscle whereas Dunne is a behavioral scientist with an expertise in the use of technology — but they both identified that same need.

While holding a postdoctoral position at the University of Birmingham, Impey began exploring the application of his PhD research around the timing of carbohydrate intake to help the body best adapt to training. Proper nutrition can increase the benefit of exercise, helping people get fitter, faster. He said he had compiled “a reasonably interesting Excel sheet” and thought he’d bounce some ideas off Dunne.

“I’ll never forget his face when I showed it to him,” Impey recalled, “because he was like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ And he said, ‘Look, I’m actually doing the the same thing.’ But I think he was nine, 12 months, further down the road than me.”

Image courtesy of Hexis

They joined forces, along with three other co-founders: Rodrigo Mazorra Blanco, the director of engineering and CFO; Xiaoxi Yan, who leads data science; and Carmen Lefevre-Lewis, a behavioral scientist who is also a UX research manager at Meta. Impey praised the executive team’s diverse experience and its “strong and encouraging check-and-challenge culture.”

Though most of the team’s experience is in Europe, Dunne’s CV includes a stint as a performance science consultant for Orreco — winner of SBJ Tech’s Best in Athlete Performance for 2022 — where he provided in-person support to client teams, including a two-year stint helping out periodically with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.

As with many startups, Hexis draws on elite sport experience to design and develop the product so it’s suitable for professional athletes, but the app is accessible for anyone who trains regularly.

“The reason we built Hexis and where we thought we could really cause a shift in behavior is more around planning,” Impey said, explaining that most tools available are retrospective, but they want to target prospective action.

“Adherence is obviously the golden nugget for everyone,” Dunne said, noting that team spends extensive time exploring ways to engage with all kinds of users who respond to different messaging and prompts at different times of day.

As prevalent as the technology is, one area Hexis has not delved into is machine learning. “When it comes to physiology, we don’t want the system to make a mistake and learn from its mistake,” Dunne said. “We feel there’s pretty good rules around exercise metabolism and biochemistry that, with the development of AI and expert systems, we can give a right and a wrong answer.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

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“When I took over the Head Physician job at the New England Patriots, I saw a very unique opportunity to provide medical leadership at the next level,” says Dr Matthew Provencher.

“Fortunately, we had a great coach in Bill Belichick, great ownership in the Krafts, Jonathan and Robert, and I really talked to them around the facility about providing a competitive medical advantage and how we would do that.”

Provencher, who served as the Patriots’ Medical Director between 2013 and 2016 – earning a Super Bowl ring in 2014 – is the latest guest of John Portch and Joe Lemire’s on the People Behind the Tech podcast, which is brought to you by the Leaders Performance Institute and SBJ Tech.

Provencher is one of the foremost orthopaedic surgeons in the world and has treated elite athletes from across the globe at the Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado.

In a wide-ranging chat, we also explored:

• His time in the Navy and his work developing US Special Ops’ Tactical Athlete Program [5:00];
• Working with multidisciplinary staffs at sports teams [13:30];
• How useful the use of tech and data have been in providing medical care for athletes [20:40];
• How the nature of injury occurrences have evolved in recent years [28:30].

Joe Lemire Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By Luke Whitworth

Our latest Performance Support Series explores the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ that influence performance under pressure. Across the three sessions within the series, we will look to develop our understanding behind the physiological responses to pressure from the athlete, coach and staff perspective.

Part one, which looked at better understanding athletes’ physiological responses under pressure, is available here.

We moved into the second session where the focus shifted to content and thinking around:

• Front-loading and intentionally setting up high pressure scenarios.
• Practical strategies for training and competition.
• Reframing the threat to opportunity.
• Quality of self-talk.
• Importance of communication.

Working with the nervous system

As we explored in session one, there is a need to spend time working on our physiological response to pressure. Do your people and athletes really know what it feels like when you experience that adrenaline surge and what changes in the body? How are we working with the nervous system so we can become comfortable being uncomfortable? Giving more tolerance for people to be uncomfortable feeds into this, however it doesn’t actually give them the skill or the tool in their toolkit to understand how to work with the physiology when it gets out of control – we want to develop strategies and deployable skills to take control of the arousal state.

As part of the session, we explored the theme of ‘identity statements’. This is another layer that gives athletes a very powerful identity statement to say that they have earned the right to be able to say, ‘I’m someone who does difficult things’ – it’s actually a really powerful statement when we’re trying to counter unimpactful self-talk that some athletes will try to convince themselves of.

Creative strategies

A really simple but effective strategy for those operating in daily training environments is the use of ice baths or plunge pools. It’s a resourceful strategy – when you get in, the huge adrenaline rush will be present. Breathing tightens, shoulders tense and the heart will begin pounding. We typically see athletes in particular use them for physical recovery, but it’s a great way of dovetailing this with training the physiological response.

How to make this really effective? Don’t do any specific breathing techniques or practices in advance. The reality of the performance arena is that you will need to control your arousal state in that specific moment – there isn’t time to prepare in advance of it. Through consistent training, eventually an athlete or person will get to the point of calm – when it gets to this stage, look to get creative once again through introducing cognitive tasks and intensifying the challenge. Rachel shared that within elite military environment settings, the challenge is ramped up considerably including complex maths questions or communication and translation of a foreign language.

Finally, you might also like to introduce something such as a fine motor skill aligned to an element of performance in your sport; an example being to relax your hand whilst training the response to integrate some performance orientation.

Threat focus

Where’s the threat? Where’s the danger? When considering pressure, the magic is not to buy into the panic. We are striving for situations when the body and mind are trying to do something, you are able to take control because you have learnt how to control it when it kicks in. The only time a stress response kicks in is when we’ve actually got another response that we need to handle and execute on, this concept is known as ‘threat focus’. In most performance environments, we don’t have enough time to notice, think about the what and the go to strategy.

Creating awareness for athletes or others around threat focus is important, it’s powerful to ask athletes in particular ‘what did you notice about yourself? What was your go to?’ You will hear responses such as a feeling of tension through the shoulders, the heart pounding or ‘my mind went into a victim mindset’. Provide space for those self-awareness moments and exposure.

Coaches and performance staff should also look to be involved in this process. You will often here coaching staff wanting their athletes to improve at handling and staying calm under pressure. An interesting insight shared within the roundtable was how many coaches do this work as well? Many coaches and performance staff don’t think they need to do it.

Mental rehearsal

The notion of mental rehearsal isn’t new to high performance environments. However, relating to the topic for this Performance Support Series, this is not mental rehearsal from the perspective of generic visualisation. This rehearsal is visualising yourself in the performance arena right now and working on ways to get into a calm state so that the brain waves are in a more optimal state. The practice is visualising yourself doing the difficult thing and experiencing how your strategies impact the difficult thing. This is where consistency of training neurophysiologically is important to ensure there isn’t a movement towards the ‘fear track’ and instead stay in the ‘calm track’.

Weaving strategies in skills training

We have already discussed the importance of building the muscle of the nervous system in training environments. What are some practical things we can do:

• Breath control (not breath work) with physical exertion. From the get go, learning to control breathing so that it stays slower and more under control because our thought processes tend to follow our breathing pattern.
• Use recovery positions and rest periods well. Where are the moments you can look to drop heart rate and breathing to aid recovery in a short amount of time during game time?
• Ice baths for arousal state control as well as physical recovery.
• Practice precision techniques ‘gassed’. This helps to build awareness of how things break down under pressure with either fine motor or cognitive. This is also useful for staff when giving athletes instructions. How well have they actually understood?
• Use uncertainty in drills, mix things up and have athletes problem-solve.
• Use the physical exertion to train arousal state control: fine motor, cognitive and situation awareness. Deck of cards conditioning drill.
• Consider impact on team culture. When it’s really tough in certain scenarios, who goes to the victim mindset? Who starts to blame others?
• Train the response. Don’t necessarily ask how do we reproduce that exact scenario in training as it will be almost impossible to mimic. Instead work on the response.
• Weaving in precision technique under pressure. Creating situations and scenarios where simple technique work is put under duress.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Dylan Frittelli grabbed a share of the golf world’s attention in November 2020 at the rescheduled Masters when he finished the first round tied for the lead. Most notable was his length off the tee, an improvement in driving distance that persisted through the 2021 season. In fact, Frittelli gained 18 yards in average distance — by far the most on the PGA Tour that year.

Such power can come with a cost in accuracy, however. Until recently, when he began working with Cory Jez and his new TourIQ golf analytics business, Frittelli had no way to objectively measure the holistic impact on his game.

“I wouldn’t have any clue how to go about it,” Frittelli said. But he was able to ask Jez, “Have I actually improved my overall ball striking? Or does missing a few more fairways actually hurt me?”

“He did a deep dive in the analysis,” Frittelli continued, “and he basically found out it was almost a break-even, but then my wedge play was much worse out of the rough. So he was like, ‘Look, you’re hitting it much farther down, but you’re in the rough more.’ And between him and my coach, we decided, OK, maybe I’m going to toggle back a bit on driving distance.”

Golf is a data-rich sport, particularly with the PGA Tour’s Shotlink system generating several metrics per shot (and with an upgrade expected soon). TourIQ has more than 12 million Shotlink-tracked shots in its database. But golfers are independent contractors who don’t have the pooled resources to establish the necessary data infrastructure or hire analysts and developers to mine for insights.

That’s the need Jez is trying to fill. He is a former Director of Basketball Analytics for the Utah Jazz who then held a similar role foe Austin FC. That’s where he met Frittelli, a University of Texas graduate who had befriended some of the MLS club’s executives. Jez developed TourIQ to analyze and visualize data across four modules: a player’s own game analysis, course profiles, hole strategy recommendations and a schedule optimizer that can recommend which tournaments a golfer enters.

“It’s exactly what I would build for an NBA team, but it’s just built for a PGA Tour golfer instead,” Jez said. “For one-tenth of that cost, you can get 95% of the benefit.”

Photo: TourIQ

There are two tiers of access. Platform partners can use the portal for a fee in the low five figures while consulting partners receive additional individualized analysis for a flat fee plus a commission based on Tour earnings.

Jez is the founder and CEO while his software engineer is Phil Baker, whose day job is as the Assistant Director of Baseball Systems for the Cleveland Guardians. TourIQ’s advisors include BreakAway Data co-founder Steve Gera and StatsBomb founder Ted Knutson. They draw on their experience in pro team settings to inform not only the relevant data science but also the communication of the findings.

“I quickly realized in those roles that, obviously, the Moneyball part — building the predictive model to value the player — is definitely part of the job,” Jez said, “but so much of the job is, how do you get this information to your stakeholders in a really quick, easy-to-consume, easy-to-integrate way? How do you get a head coach to use the model?”

Two years ago, Frittelli spent considerable time working on his putting. After a couple months of practice, Frittelli wondered how it really translated to his performance.

“I knew my putting was bad — bad relative to the other guys — but I didn’t really have a metric to tell whether it was getting better or worse,” he said.

There are so many variables in terms of greens and pins to sift out the signal from the noise, but Jez built a model to determine that Frittelli’s putting was, in fact, improving.

Photo: TourIQ

“There’s a bit of evidence here: now I know what I’m working on helps,” Frittelli said. “Previously I would just go on feel and I’d be looking at it like tournament to tournament or day by day. And it’s really hard to have that sort of bird’s eye view and know if you’re getting better when you’re just looking at small snippets of data.”

TourIQ normalizes the data to account for course variations and strength of tournament field, using 24- and 76-round moving averages as the default comparisons for recent play and baseline performance. The schedule optimizer identified two courses in particular for Frittelli to enter: the Sanderson Farms Championship in Jackson, Mississippi, and the World Wide Technology Championship in Mexico.

The 17th green at the Waste Management Phoenix Open proved a good case study in hole strategy. It’s a drivable par-four, but the second round’s pin location in the back-right corner mandated a different approach: hit to right of the green rather than straight ahead. Frittelli followed suit and made a birdie.

Photo: TourIQ

Generally, Frittelli said, his own experience and the accumulated wisdom of his long-tenured caddie are sufficient. But some of TourIQ’s more counterintuitive recommendations are worth jotting down in his yardage book.

“That’s what I always tell him, ‘I want to find anomalies,’” he said. “It doesn’t help if you tell me to miss it in the right rough here or left rough there. That’s obvious on most holes. But if there’s a random one that says ‘hit it in a different fairway’ or ‘hit it in this fairway bunker’ that gives me an edge that I wouldn’t think about, that’s where he comes in big time.”

“We can essentially give players the cheat sheet on how to play this hole when the pin’s front, when the pin’s back,” said Jez, noting that impact of a shot or two improvement per round. “Being able to make more informed decisions on those margins might be the difference between keeping your [Tour] Card or not. You take a missed cut, and you replace it with a 20th [place] — and you’re a guy who is a middle-of-the-field type of player — and that has really big implications.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.