By Jack Nayler

In part one, I set out the idea of complex environments using the analogy of a car in traffic. This time around I want to bring it into a more relatable context – the game, and what I believe operating in complex environments means for how we prepare athletes.

As our metaphorical car entered the complexity of a city, a player enters a match. All team sports are complex in nature. The degree of complexity in each sport varies depending on the number of players and the structures inherent through the laws of each game. Football is one of the most complex of team sports. Whilst it is continuous like basketball, it has more players. And although rugby and American football have as many or more players, there are fewer set plays in football, so it flows more. Couple this complexity with the low scoring and there is more uncertainty over results in football than in other sports; a factor that contributes to its global popularity.

The complex nature of team sports means that the generalities of complex systems also exist within the game. The player on the ball is closest to the action so has the greatest chance to influence the game at that moment. As the ball moves, so does the influence of each player, in proximity to the ball.

The future is also uncertain. Once the referee has blown the whistle to start the match, we have no idea what will happen next or even how long exactly the game will last.

Team sports: a microcosm of life

Team sports are all extremely popular as their complexity creates a microcosm of life. The tactical, technical, physical and cognitive demands are all wrapped up together and it is difficult to break them down into discrete buckets. The performance of each individual player will emerge from the interaction of all these components.

Remember that complexity is fractal, so whilst the performance of each player on the team will emerge from the interactions of these four components, the performance of the team will emerge from the interactions between each player, and the outcome of the match will emerge from the interactions between the teams, the fans, officials, weather etc.

This has implications for how we prepare our teams to perform. Once a player sets foot on the field of play, our ability to influence the outcome as coaching and support staff diminishes. We need to provide our players with the skillset to deal with whatever emerges in the game. Because the game is constantly evolving in real time, our players need to be able to make sense of what is happening in front of them and find solutions to the puzzles presented within the game.

Remember that the more we try to control a complex system and add safety, the more we can leave ourselves open to bigger problems. Coaches of all levels appreciate this. If all training consisted of each week was the starting line-up vs an opposition with the coach dictating 90 minutes of match play pass-by-pass, the team would very quickly come unstuck in the game at the weekend.

Nassim Taleb talks of Fragility, Robustness and Antifragility (1). Whilst the robust team is able to repel the challenge posed by another team, an anti-fragile team will have the toolkit to assess their opponent in real-time and exploit their weaknesses.

This is one of the reasons why we now recognise the power of games-based approaches in skill acquisition and developing fitness (2, 3, 4). I have seen through in-house research over the years the more beneficial hormonal response of games and competition for adaptation in players.

This does not mean that there isn’t space for isolated physical and skill-based training in sport. Developing running technique can positively alter factors associated with increased injury risk (5) and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has a beneficial effect on a variety of underpinning physical performance factors in football (6). These are key pieces of the performance puzzle. The art comes in how and when they are deployed as well as how they are blended together effectively with the technical and tactical training, to greatest effect.

Raising a player’s ceiling

What we need is a variety of complementary practice spaces to allow players (as individual complex entities) to develop capabilities themselves before then applying them in context.

In complex environments, we want to try and expand the ceiling of a player’s capabilities, so as the vast majority of the fluctuations in the system (the game) come within their physical limits. Hamstrings are the most injured area of the body in football, and most hamstring injuries occur during sprinting. It would be tempting therefore to try to reduce risk by minimising the exposure a player has to sprinting. However, as soon as the game demands that the player sprints, their risk is much greater as we haven’t prepared them properly to do that. We believe now that regular sprinting exposure (appropriately placed in the training week) will confer protection from hamstring injuries (7).

As discussed, an individual player is their own complex system. Their performance will emerge from the interaction of their technical, tactical, physical and cognitive capabilities, which are all intertwined. We need to treat each player within our squad as an individual and design their training programme accordingly.  This should develop their capabilities in line with the demands that will be placed upon them by the playing style/game model and the competition, whilst considering their own personal history (injuries, training age, maturation status etc).

The on-field training should then reflect the game model, and competition demands sufficiently to allow the player to apply, develop and exhibit these physical capabilities in context of, and interwoven with, the cognitive, technical and tactical demands. Again, through research conducted in-house, I have seen the importance of training at match intensity during the week for reducing risk of injury and increasing performance; come the weekend and the research shows that maintaining higher chronic loading will help to reduce injury risk (8).

The growing appreciation of these factors have led to moves away from more traditional periodisation models first developed in individual Olympic sports where physical qualities were trained in an isolated but sequential manner. The rise of Tactical Periodisation models (9) has attempted to address team preparation holistically during the on-field training itself. Different constraints are placed upon the design of the practice on a day-by-day and week-to-week basis that provide affordances for technical, tactical, psychological and physical attributes to be overloaded on any given day.

When sports science and performance blur together

The support staff around the players need to understand this process and the underlying motivation for it each day from the coaching staff. Physical preparation, therapeutic work, psychological skills training all need to be complementary to this process and not detrimental.

As each player is their own complex system, they are themselves closest to the action. No one should know the player’s body and how it feels better than them, though admittedly this takes time to learn as a professional athlete.

I believe that a player-involved as opposed to player-centred approach is vital in developing this knowledge. Although the difference is subtle, it is an important distinction to make. In a player-centred model, the team of practitioners, ologists and experts discuss the player and develop a plan, drawing on all their expertise. A player-involved model brings the player into that process, involving them in the decision making and design of their training. The player needs respecting as a key member of the interdisciplinary team. Not only will this help to develop the player’s understanding of their body and the training process, but also their investment and trust in the programme. This is key in a sport such as football where the link between doing physical work and performance isn’t always immediately obvious and the talent pool is global; from different cultures and backgrounds.

The whole programme therefore needs careful management in a trans-disciplinary manner. When sports science first entered football around 30 years ago it was perceived as a standalone service where players spent time separately to the coaching team. This then developed into larger multidisciplinary teams of practitioners working within their field of expertise, but they were still often siloed. The rise of the Head of Performance brought distinct disciplines together to form interdisciplinary teams operating in a more integrated manner.

These lines are now blurring further. Technology has allowed S&C coaches to do many of the things that were previously the domain of the sports scientist (e.g. analysing jump tests). The rehabilitation process starts with the doctor or physio but ends with technical coaches delivering elements. Analysts and sports scientists co-create drills that match the technical, tactical and physical demands for a player completing some additional conditioning work.

What needs placing around a complex system, as a way of helping to manage and steer it in the direction we need, is a framework that guides those within the system in their decision making.

Psychology is a case in point.  There is a clear need for performance psychology to help develop the toolkit of capabilities that players have at their disposal, and the wider training should help to develop and test these capabilities in a realistic manner. However, everyone in the organisation has a brain between their ears and is interacting with one another so is, to a greater or lesser extent, doing psychology in some way. A framework, or Psychologically Informed Environment (PIE) is essential to ensure that as far as possible all the interactions happening within an organisation are in service of the performance (and I would consider wellbeing intrinsic to performance) and not detrimental to it.

So, we return to the fractal nature of complexity and the different scales at which complexity exists. The sporting organisation itself is a complex entity and each person within it will exert different levels of control at different times.

This has implications for the way that we lead these environments, and this is what I want to delve into in the third and fourth parts of this series.

Summary

• Performance in sport emerges from the interaction of the tactical, technical, physical and cognitive demands placed upon the player, and then the team.
• When preparing teams, we need to give the players the combined skillset to recognise and solve problems on the field of play in the moment, as practitioners trying to place more control will only result in bigger errors and problems.
• Instead, constraints should be placed around the practice space to allow the desired response to emerge.
• As much as possible, practices should then be designed in a complementary manner, with one eye on the whole.
• Including the player in the process has a two-fold positive effect. It educates the player and increases buy-in to the programme.
• Can you create a clear framework for performance in your environment?

References

1. Taleb, N.N., 2012. Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. New York: Random House.
2. Gabbett, T., Jenkins, D., & Abernethy, B., 2009. Game-Based Training for Improving Skill and Physical Fitness in Team Sport Athletes. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 4, pp. 273 – 283.
3. Kinnerk, P., Harvey, S., MacDonncha, C., & Lyons, M., 2018. A Review of the Game-Based Approaches to Coaching Literature in Competitive Team Sport Settings. Quest, 70, pp. 401 – 418.
4. Manninen, M., Magrum, E., Campbell, S., & Belton, S., 2024. The effect of game-based approaches on decision-making, knowledge, and motor skill: A systematic review and a multilevel meta-analysis. European Physical Education Review, 31, pp. 18 – 32.
5. Clemente, F., Ramirez-Campillo, R., Nakamura, F., & Sarmento, H., 2020. Effects of high-intensity interval training in men soccer player’s physical fitness: A systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized-controlled and non-controlled trials. Journal of Sports Sciences, 39, pp. 1202 – 1222.
6. Silva, M., Fonseca, P., Fernandes, R., & Conceição, F., 2024. Is Running Technique Important to Mitigate Hamstring Injuries in Football Players?. Applied Sciences.
7. Edouard, P., Mendiguchia, J., Guex, K., Lahti, J., Prince, C., Samozino, P. & Morin, J., 2022. Sprinting: a key piece of the hamstring injury risk management puzzle. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(1), pp.4–6.
8. Morgans, R., Oliveira, R., Mandorino, M., Zmijewski, P., Ryan, B., Modric, T., Teixeira, J. & Moreira, A., 2026. The loading impact of training and match-play on non-contact muscle injuries in elite male soccer players: A seasonal analysis. Biology of Sport, 43, pp.107–114.
9. Delgado-Bordonau, J.L. & Méndez-Villanueva, A., 2012. Tactical periodization: Mourinho’s best-kept secret? Soccer Journal, May–June, pp.28–34.

By Jack Nayler

I first stumbled across the concept of complexity a little over ten years ago and it was a watershed moment in my career.

However, in a truly complex manner, it was the combination of my lived experience to that point, my educational background and the reading I was doing in my own time around the subject that led to my appreciation of complexity and its implications for those concerned with sporting performance.

Over the course of four articles, I want to explain how I see the world of elite sport, the complex system at its heart, and the most effective way I currently see of managing performance within that context.

I will delve into the implications for sports and the operations within teams before outlining what this all means for leaders in this space.

But first, I want define what a complex system actually is and set out its characteristics.

Learning from failure

My real understanding came, inevitably, in learning from failure.

The white paper by the late Dr Richard Cook of the University of Chicago entitled How Complex Systems Fail was instrumental in helping me to understand the ramifications of complexity on the undertaking of performance in a sports setting.

Dr Cook was an anaesthetist and simultaneously and internationally respected researcher. His short treatise is regarded as one of the most influential works in the field of patient medical safety. It was this understanding of how systems fail that brought together everything else I had seen and learnt and began to change the way I saw performance management in professional sports.

Around this time, I was challenged by a friend in the industry to put together my thoughts on building a performance department for a sports team. I found it challenging just to make an org chart and list positions without giving the background and rationale for why and how the department existed in that structure as well as its philosophical construct. This exercise of transferring ideas from my head on to paper forced me to critically confront my assumptions and crystallised my thoughts on how I believe we need to operate in the complex environment of elite professional team sports (specifically football as this has been my professional experience).

So, what do we mean by complex?

Dave Snowden is a researcher in the field of knowledge management and is the creator of the Cynefin Framework that helps us to make sense of the different types of environments in which we operate.

‘Cynefin’, which is pronounced ‘ku-nev-in’, is a Welsh word explaining there are multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand.

The model contains five domains, all of which can exist at any given moment, and we move between them:

Source: HBR

The clear domain has obvious cause and effect and well-established best practice. There are many examples of this in elite sports, for instance, data hygiene when downloading and analysing GPS data or packing medical equipment for an away match.

In the complicated domain, there are correct answers to problems, but they may take some expertise or understanding to deliver and there are governing constraints within which the answer will lie.

An example from sport would be developing a fuelling strategy for a player in a match. We need learned expertise in nutrition and we need to do some analysis on the demands that player faces in match play, as well as understand how their physiology responds to those demands. There are then governing constraints (carbohydrate is the main fuel source in performance) but within those constraints, the solution will be different depending on the sport and the athlete, but the solution can be determined.

I find the easiest way to consider the difference between a complicated and a complex environment is by using the analogy of a car.

A car is an extremely complicated piece of technology. The first practical automobile was invented by Karl Benz in 1885 and had several hundred components. The modern family car by comparison contains over 30,000 parts on average.

Despite this huge number of component parts, should one of them fail and the car stop working, the defective component can be replaced and the performance of the car restored. The performance of the car in this case is its ability to move with you on board and there is a linear process from depressing your foot on the accelerator to make that car move. A skilled technician should be able to completely take the car apart, rebuild it and restore its performance.

Take that same car and ask it to transport you across a city such as London and it enters a complex system where the performance of the car (the time it takes to transport you from point A to point B) is no longer determined by the car itself (it would make little difference if you drove a Ferrari or a Fiat), but in the interaction of the inter-connected parts that make up the complex system. These include the status of the driver (in how much of a hurry they are and their relative stress level), the other cars and their respective drivers, traffic signals, roadworks, cyclists, pedestrians, emergency services, major events going on that day, the time of day and the weather etc. There are many other potential components to the system, not all of which are obvious when sat in the car itself.

The performance of the car (how quickly it reaches its destination) will emerge from the interaction of all these components and each one is concurrently performing at the centre of their own complex system.

So, the first thing to know is that in a complex environment, performance emerges from between the components an in inter-dependent manner, and not from the summation of the performance of each component in isolation.

The next part to understand about complexity is that it is fractal. Fractals are geometric shapes that contain the same detailed structure at ever smaller scales. This means that complex systems exist at smaller and larger scales and nest within one another. They simultaneously are affected by the scale below and affect the scale above.

Below the scale of our car, the driver is their own complex system, and their performance is determined by (amongst other things) their genetics, upbringing, education, wellbeing, as well as how well they have slept last night, what they had for breakfast and whether they are running late or not.

At a larger scale, the performance of the traffic system designed by city planners is affected by the performance of all the cars on the roads.

The person closest to the action in the complex system has the greatest chance to affect it at any given moment, in this example it is the driver of the car. Each decision they make will create a new reality and alter the course of the complex system (for reference see the film Sliding Doors). The decision to put your foot down to get through an amber light rather than braking in anticipation of a red light will affect the course of the complex system and other components within it.

This person closest to the action may have the greatest chance to influence the performance of the system, but they also have the narrowest focus and least ability to see the big picture. This is where external information can help inform their decision (SatNav, Waze or radio traffic reports). Ultimately though, it remains their decision.

Because performance emerges in real time as we navigate through the city and react to what we encounter in front of us, we cannot with complete accuracy predict what will happen in the future as we set out on the journey, or how good our performance (the journey time) will be.

All decisions taken by the driver therefore contain an element of risk and are (hopefully educated) gambles. These decisions are being made on a moment-by-moment basis are determined in part by what has already happened and will influence what is to come.

As all the components in the system are simultaneously operating in their own individual complex system, agreement between them isn’t perfect. Thus, complex systems are never perfect, they operate in a sub-optimal mode. No route across London provides a perfect path where you will be able to drive without braking or even coming to a stop. The challenge is that we cannot know exactly where the imperfections will lie.

Once we have finished our journey and the performance is determined, the impact of all our decisions is laid bare. With hindsight our choices take on a sequential profile and we can fall victim to a narrative fallacy, where each decision makes sense in context of what came after it. What we need to remember is that at the time we made each decision, we were blind to the future and couldn’t know exactly the outcome. That left turn that led to roadworks suddenly becomes a disaster that caused all our problems, whilst the decision to cut through the backstreets, a moment of genius. However, we will never know the alternate realities of the other options we could have selected.

The last part of complex systems I wish to convey is that the more we try to control the system, the more we leave ourselves open to system errors adversely affecting our progress in the long-term.

By control I mean to attempt to force or determine an outcome. The decision to jump a red light or speed along a section of road can lead to being pulled over by the police, which will cause a delay that greatly outweighs the seconds saved through our actions. The right way to operate in the system will emerge by experimentation, trying different routes, times of day or even modes of transport to complete the journey.

To bring us out of an over-extended analogy and back into the real world I want to emphasise that we should not be fatalistic about complexity. I don’t want to come across like the system will determine the outcome, regardless of what we do to affect it. I believe we are an integral component in any system with the chance to affect its direction and outcomes (just remember they might not be perfect).

If we are also able to step back and appreciate the interaction between systems at larger and smaller scales than that in which we are currently operating, we can be very powerful.

Chaos and Confusion

The final two domains in the Cynefin framework are Chaos and Confusion. Chaos is where there are no clear rules or cause and effect at all, even with hindsight, and it is better to act now and think later, shooting more from the hip.

Confusion is the dark centre of the framework, when you aren’t sure which of the other four domains you are currently in.

Most of the time in elite sports I believe we deal with complexity and thus I think it is the most important to try and understand. In the next two parts I will go on to discuss the implications of operating in this domain for sporting organisations, and what that means for leaders in this space.

Summary

• In a complex environment, performance emerges from the spaces between the components in an inter-dependent manner.
• Complex systems are fractal – they exist at smaller and larger scales and nest within each other.
• The person closest to the action in a complex system has the greatest chance to affect the outcome.
• Our knowledge and expertise are constantly changing in complexity.
• We cannot predict the future with complete accuracy, so any decisions made are essentially gambles.
• Complex systems are not perfect.
• Adding in control can lead to greater problems in the future.
• We are an integral part of the complex system, so can affect it greatly.

References

Cook, R.I., 2000. How Complex Systems Fail. [online] Available at: https://how.complexsystems.fail/ [Accessed 29 September 2025]

The Cynefin Company (n.d.) The Cynefin Framework. The Cynefin Co. Available at: https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/ (Accessed: 1 October 2025)

By John Portch

‘Peace-time plans are of no particular value,’ wrote former US President Dwight D Eisenhower in a letter to a US diplomat in 1950, ‘but peace-time planning is indispensable.’

Eisenhower liked the sentiment enough to repeat variations during his time in the White House and the appeal to people working in elite sport is obvious.

In fact, Patrick Mannix, the Sports Science Senior Manager at US Soccer, began his recent presentation to Leaders Performance Institute members with that very line.

“The idea behind this quote is that high-performance teams don’t necessarily have a static plan,” said Mannix.

“The plan is constantly evolving as new information comes to light, whether that’s in relation to the tournament that we’re playing in, the players that we’re working with, and a variety of other contexts that are relevant to the world of international soccer.”

With those words, Mannix set the scene for a discussion that centered on performance planning in the international game, specifically the development of camp training plans for players who join up from their respective clubs in the US and beyond.

First, he offered a summary:

Mannix then shared how he and his colleagues approach international training camps from a sports science and medicine perspective with the help of this cycle:

“Building rapport and trust with those clubs is massively important,” said Mannix, “because that helps us drive a lot of the exchange of information.”

He then outlined the common challenges he and his team face in the realms of communication, health & safety and load management:

In explaining how they meet those challenges, Mannix focused on three areas in particular:

1. Club and country alignment
2. The time of year
3. Camp objectives

1. Club and country alignment

The US national teams draw on players from across the globe and, even for matches in the US itself, such is the size of the country that most personnel will have made a long-haul journey.

This map, which depicts the travel schedule of the US men’s team during the 2025 Concacaf Gold Cup, provides some idea of the challenges present even in a domestic setting:

“We need to know when our equipment and staff are arriving and where our players are coming from,” said Mannix in reflection on this map. It calls for close collaboration between the technical/coaching staff, the high performance team and the operations team.

“When a coach is trying to build out the session plan, the right hand is a good sports scientist or a performance coach, and the left hand is the first assistant, and those three individuals are working very closely to ensure that there’s a good plan in place for every training session,” Mannix continued.

“There’s good understanding as to what the availability of the players is going to be, particularly in the first two days of training, because what we’ve found through communication with clubs is we sometimes have to be flexible when players are coming into our environment simply because although Europe observes FIFA windows, we have to work with our partners in MLS on when players are released to come and join our environment.”

Mannix and his colleagues understand the range of fixed and dynamic constraints they face. They use that understanding to find optimization indicators.

2. Time of year

The leagues of North America operate on a different seasonal calendar to their European counterparts, which requires tailored approaches to preparation and recovery for each player.

Staggered arrivals in camp is a prime example. Players may be excluded from certain match days depending on their status.

Additionally, the federation will try to use domestic camps “to address the identity of the team” and “hybrid camps where we look to go abroad, ideally to play opponents from Africa, Asia, and Europe so we get a variety of different opponents of the kind that we could potentially face in a World Cup.”

Travel logistics are a focus too. “We try to increase our sleep and recovery opportunities, decrease the number of flights to hopefully avoid a situation where the players have to get up at the crack of dawn to hop on a plane,” said Mannix.

Then there are cultural considerations. “The November window for the women’s national team will overlap with the Thanksgiving holiday,” he said, adding, “we’re working with chefs to ensure that we can put together a really creative Thanksgiving meal so the team feel like they have that communal or family experience.”

Ultimately, when it comes to periodizing camps, US teams have eight time scales to consider:

These come with several potential challenges:

Mannix shared the example of a convalescing player joining the men’s national team for the 2024 Olympic football tournament. “In close collaboration with the club, we mapped out the tissue healing process, what the rehab was going to look like and then also what his reintegration into his team training back in his club environment would be,” he said.

“Then we had to negotiate if he were to join us in the Olympics what his match exposure would look like once he joined us, because his first time competing in official competition following the injury would be under our care. So it was super important for US Soccer that this individual was included in the roster because of his long-term trajectory within the national team.”

3. Camp objectives

The coaches and support staff at US Soccer develop training plans three weeks prior to a camp, with session plans devised two weeks out once player arrival times are confirmed.

“We will design things from a team level, but then we also have to look at matters very closely at an individual level when we’re trying to safely integrate players into our national team environments.”

Mannix also spoke of periodization (the macro-level planning of when and why) and programming (the micro-level execution of what and how). He explained the distinction using the following table:

“Most of the time, we are dealing with tapering strategies and figuring out how can we optimize players’ readiness going into competition,” he said. “So it’s often an exercise in fatigue management when they’re coming into our environment and not necessarily trying to drive fitness adaptations, but, on the flip side, we’re also there to potentially facilitate a lot of those long-term physiological adaptations that are occurring.

“When it comes to planning, some of these training variables are super important. Things like training frequency, density, volume, and intensity, ensuring that those are squared away and, with our coaching staff, exercise order. So when it comes to building out session plans, making sure that the sessions are sequenced in the correct fashion.

“Again, I think that’s a lot of close communication and collaboration with primarily our head coach and our first assistant.”

What to read next

Transparency, Empathy and Empowerment: Five Ways Teams Are Serving their People in 2025

Main image: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images for FIH

By Rachel Woodland

The Women’s High Performance Sport Community Group is an action-orientated space for those working in high performance sport.

Since its inception, and through conversations across sports and nations, we’ve noted the importance of transitions in women’s sport, particularly as athletes come to the end of their professional careers.

The topic of transitions formed the basis of our first group conversation of the year, with the conversation led by former athletes Giselle Ansley, a Senior Account Executive with Specialist Sports; Emily Defroand, the Football Communications Lead at West Ham United; and Emma Mitchell, who recently left her position as a Performance Lifestyle Advisor at the UK Sports Institute and who worked directly with the duo during their playing careers.

Ansley and Defroand are former GB Hockey players, who won a wealth of medals between them. Ansley won Olympic gold and bronze, as well as Commonwealth gold, silver, and bronze. Defroand won a European bronze, as well as a Commonwealth bronze. Both have won many a domestic title too.

Mitchell, who won a PLx Award in 2023, won the 1994 Women’s Rugby World Cup playing for England and helped set up the Saracens women’s team.

Over the course of the conversation, we delved into Mitchell’s work and the realities for Ansley and Defroand as they began to transition in their careers.

Why it’s valued

Ansley knew she was aiming to leave post-Paris (2024) and began working with Mitchell post-Tokyo (2021). For her part, Defroand suffered multiple injuries where her body almost told her she needed to plan ahead.

In reflecting on her playing days, Ansley said: “In fact, Emma Mitchell’s role in Great Britain hockey and the impact that she had on me personally effectively changed my life.”

Mitchell had experiences from a different sport, which helped her leverage her expertise around coaching the person. She became immersed in the team behind the team and working with the wider staff and athlete squad in the pursuit of a common goal. “I don’t think there’s anything more powerful than that in sport because everyone is committed to the same thing,” she said. “It’s not necessarily a medal or winning a World Cup. It’s bigger than that and it’s something that’s so unifying. It’s quite incredible in terms of engagement levels.”

The realisation that playing a sport as a professional won’t be an option forever meant it wasn’t taken for granted. It also meant that they wanted to make the most of the opportunity and soak  up learnings and conversations with practitioners.

This is how it works:

1. There’s been a shift from career coaching to managing transitions, which covers everything from someone joining the programme, to sustaining a long-term injury or any other significant change whilst in the programme, with extra emphasis on ‘leaving well’.
2. Leaving well tends to involve starting to plan early. It comes back to knowing each athlete’s individual journey, and working at their pace. They have to own the process.
3. Values exercises underpin much of the work. One of which involves spreading out many words that might represent someone’s value and them collating those they feel most strongly align to themselves, and whether they’re ‘always valued’ or ‘less valued’. And remember: it can be just important to know what you don’t value.
4. Former athletes are invited to share how it worked for them, and hearing about a range of experiences with the process. Defroand said:

“Don’t get me wrong when I was at Bisham [the HQ of GB Hockey], I had absolutely no intention to retire at 26 but by being in the same room as athletes, some that have retired in their own terms, some that haven’t, some of them that tried through selection or injury. Everyone’s experiences are completely unique to themselves, but having heard from other athletes their first experiences of how their transition worked for them really helped me understand and know how complex that process is.”

5. Make the most of time when athletes can’t play. For example, when they’re injured. Using the network of athletes and people in the community, where there are so many people willing to help.
6. Remember that many of the skills you learn through your sport are transferable, highly valued, and not as common as you think they are, such as discipline, teamwork, leading, and following.
7. Peer to peer programmes with athletes from other sports and mentoring programmes. “I still don’t know how many people understand in the moment just how valuable these skills will be later in life, but just keep telling them that they really are,” said Ansley.
8. For Mitchell, it was important to get to know each person. There was a list of approximately 20 athletes who were seen as high potential, who GB Hockey wanted to make sure they stayed in the sport. Mitchell said:

“I focused on those and had some success with some of those. It’s just building up a little bit of success, building up good rapport with the group, being present in a lot of culture work, which I think is just so important. And then trying to work with each individual away from the performance environment to progress whatever it was they were looking to do.”

9. To also have someone who isn’t a coach making decisions about selection have these conversations is powerful, as the athletes can open up further and know they’re not there to deep dive into a specific skill or tactic. Defroand said:

“Regardless of whether you come from that sport or not, it’s about how we’re developing us as people rather than just the hockey player. [It’s about] providing the safe space to talk and explore thoughts and work through challenging situations and developing other identities; being aware of other identities that are within you. Experiences that give you perspective and make you feel so lucky because you know you’re in the sport for a certain amount of time and that that will be it. [This can be] so valuable.”

What’s missing?

“I really don’t think we should underestimate the impact that this sort of support during and after each transition can have,” said Ansley. Not all sports get the excellent support that Mitchell has provided at GB Hockey. Providing the opportunity from an early stage of an athlete’s career is critical, even if they don’t engage with it immediately.

With more athletes not postponing starting a family until the end of their athletic careers it’s important to support this transition too.

Support must be there for athletes so that when they do enter the working world they’re not starting from the bottom again. Support must also be there for businesses to understand the transferability of an athlete’s skills, as well as the fact that female athletes are coming from a very different context to male athletes.

What can be done when resources are limited?

1. Think about those already in your staff that might be interested in developing in this area and could upskill themselves to provide some support and some signposting.
2. Use former athletes to share their stories.

What does it mean for others in roles supporting athletes?

Even thinking about it shows a level of care that will be appreciated by athletes. Showing understanding, but also being accepting of each athlete being in their own place with their own mindset, especially when dealing with injuries. Some might want to make the best use of that time, whatever it may be. With others believing that the best use of their time and energy is to focus solely on recovering. Some roles are in a great place to have regular check-ins, with a different bond to that of a coach. A chat can go a very long way.

Make it stick to ensure it delivers an ROI

From Mitchell’s perspective, part of the key to her success in her role came from GB Hockey choosing to embed the service within its programme philosophy. The original hire for the role came from GB Hockey’s programme budget rather than UK Sport funding for the role, a true reflection of how much they valued the work.

She also spoke about head coaches who didn’t see the work as duty of care, but as performance enhancing if done well. It’s helped extend careers, and support players enjoy an extra Olympic cycle because they dealt with what was coming next and the anxiety that can lead to.

The impact of these conversations, and the work being done by performance lifestyle advisors, has on culture shouldn’t go amiss, especially when the culture directly impacts performance in the view of the athletes.

For the athletes, the work with Mitchell helped with their motivation and longevity. Both Defroand and Ansley shared that by completing exercises like the values one elevated their appreciation for their sport and the level they were competing at. It motivated them to train their best and unlocked new levels of effort to give. It helped refine their athletic goals, but also their goals beyond that. In early days working with Mitchell, former GB Hockey player Sarah Evans [who also joined us on the call], found that there was real benefit to doing the work on herself, to help with her confidence if dropped, and to ensure that she was working to get selected knowing how she could help the squad whether or not she was on the pitch.

Mitchell said: “My feeling is that we all need a purpose and the type of people who are in sport at the elite level are incredibly driven so they will want to find something. It may never be quite the same as putting on a GB Hockey vest, but they want something that is fulfilling in a similar way. So helping them with that. And there’s research now that that actually demonstrates that athletes who engage in this type of work are likely to become the leaders in their sport and they are also likely to extend their careers, so it is actually seen as one of those that has a performance impact as well.”

Mitchell also signposted Professor David Lavallee from University of Stirling, specifically his research on transition support and measuring impact. She said: “We now capture everything we do on one database and part of that is the numbers bit. To just demonstrate, the Paris cycle was three years. I think my colleague working with the men and I had approximately 3,000 interactions across the two squads. It’s a big time sync recording all of this, yeah. It’s almost not justifying our existence, but it’s at least capturing some of that.”

Finally, we also spoke about supporting athletes to stay in sport when their playing careers come to an end. Whilst there are all sorts of initiatives to try and encourage athletes into coaching positions and gaining coaching qualifications, or staying within sports (for example, UK Sport’s Athlete to Coach programme), the reality is that even at international level coaching renumeration can be relatively low, and is naturally all consuming. For Mitchell, her role as a Performance Lifestyle Advisor was another way of deploying her coaching skills.

By Aaron Walsh

In this final article, I wanted to address the most common questions I get from coaches and organisations regarding mental performance and building a programme.

The first questions is often: how do we find the right person to lead that programme?

Before we proceed, I want to review the previous articles and examine why this question has proved challenging.

Finding the right person is difficult without the structure of a strategic program. The following quote is from a coach I interviewed while conducting my research. It perfectly captures the essence of the challenge:

“In other areas of performance, we give a clear mandate of what we want to happen in the programme, there are regular checkpoints to ensure we are on track, and we review the work after the season, with the mental stuff [skills] we tend to find a person and just let them loose, we don’t follow best practice.”

To prepare the provider for success, we need to view the work through the right lens. Rather than offering a reactive service, we aim to create a strategic program. We want to anchor the work in the foundations established throughout this series. Here are five crucial actions we can take:

1. Define the approach: Unless we define the scope of the work and set clear expectations regarding the time needed to achieve the desired outcomes, measuring the effectiveness of the work becomes impossible. For example, if we expect the team to have a fully integrated program while only employing someone for a few days each month, that goal is unachievable. Both the team and the provider will be left feeling disappointed by the gap between the intended impact and the actual results. Being realistic and resisting the urge to over-promise allows the program to be built at the right pace and in the right way.

Key questions:

• Before employing someone, are you and your team clear about your resources and time capabilities?
• Does this match your expectations of the provider?

2. Have a clear framework: With the range of subjects and focus areas in sports psychology, it can feel overwhelming for providers and teams to determine where to begin. However, a straightforward framework can offer a strategic approach that brings clarity and direction to their work. This helps prevent providers from jumping between various topics each week without achieving anything meaningful.

Key questions:

• What exposure has the team had to mental skills training?
• What foundations need to be built for the programme to be successful?
• Does the provider have the knowledge and experience to deliver these?

3. Have the right content: Mental skills are often presented in a generalised manner that overlooks the specific needs of athletes. My research found that “lack of relevance” was identified as one of the primary reasons teams struggled to see the impact of the work. If we can collaborate with the provider and clearly outline the challenges the athletes face, we can deliver a programme they can connect with.

Key questions:

• Do we know the mental demands of the sport?
• Is our content designed and presented to meet these needs?
• What are our athletes looking for in a programme?

4. Nail the delivery: For the programme’s success, it’s crucial to define how the work will be delivered. We need to align with the provider on the execution. The brief can incorporate a blend of group work, one-on-one sessions, and support for coaches. Additionally, we must discuss and agree on the provider’s presentation format and session duration.

Key questions:

• Which areas do you think will improve through mental skills training?
• Would you like the provider to collaborate with both athletes and coaches?
• What is the main method you envision for delivering this work?

Once the foundations mentioned earlier are set and the key questions have been tackled, you’ll be in a good position to identify who would be the best fit for the team and the programme.

Here are some questions to consider with potential candidates to help you find the right fit. I’ll take a practical approach, as the qualifications and experience required will differ based on each team’s needs.

1. Can they connect with people from various backgrounds and build trust?
2. Do they have sufficient knowledge and resources to support the players and staff?
3. Are they effective communicators who can engage a room?
4. Do they align with the values and performance philosophy of the head coach?
5. Do they understand the mental challenges faced by the team? (Both cultural and performance-related.)
6. Do they understand group dynamics and their influence on the collective mindset?
7. Are they able to propel work across the entire system?
8. Do they recognise what success looks like and how to evaluate it?

The final aspect I want to explore is how we can integrate them after we’ve identified the person we think is suitable for the team.

1. Clearly mention when introducing them that their role is to enhance performance, rather than just to fix underperforming athletes.
2. Include them in the coaching team rather than in a medical role unless they hold a clinical position.
3. Make the mental aspect of performance a topic you review weekly, and have them lead that process.
4. Involve them in the team’s daily rhythm. They can assist with training, support the S&C team, and more. The more you normalise their presence, the more likely they are to be integrated.
5. Regularly seek their input on coaching, leadership, and the overall health of the environment.

As this series draws to a close, I believe that this important yet overlooked aspect of performance will become a key differentiator for teams that choose to engage. Considerable investment has gone into the physical and skills components of performance. While there are still gains to be made, these will be marginal. The mental performance of teams is a sleeping giant that has yet to be fully unleashed. Teams that dedicate time and resources will see the benefits.

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Duncan French, the Senior Vice President of the UFC Performance Institute, is describing the aftermath of a bout.

“If an athlete has gone through the fight pretty well and won, then it might be a very simple kind of cool down in one of the back rooms in the locker room and just do some light work to bring themselves back down again,” he says of the victor.

“If an athlete’s had a pretty significant amount of trouble, that’s a very different strategy.”

Mixed martial arts is, as he adds, “a sport of consequences”.

It’s all in a day’s work for French, who oversees the UFC’s Performance Institutes based in Las Vegas, Shanghai and, most recently, Mexico City.

There have been some teething troubles with the Mexican facility [4:40], but French took it all in his stride, as he tells us in the first of this three-part Keiser Series Podcast focused on some of the challenges faced and lessons learned by members of the Leaders Performance Institute during 2024.

French also discussed his evolving leadership style [6:20]; the personalisation of fight preparation plans [19:30]; and his use of data to inform those strategies [28:30].

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

By Aaron Walsh

What mental performance work needs to be delivered, and how do we go about that?

To successfully integrate the work, teams need to understand what a mental performance coach can do to elevate performance and how to deliver that work most effectively. Traditionally, the delivery model has involved one person attempting to meet the needs of everyone in the environment. This often leads to frustration for both the team and the provider. The team feels like the demands are only sometimes met, while the provider feels more time is needed.

A more effective model is viewing the provider as a facilitator, where they engage the key leaders in the environment and help drive the work. Yes, contexts will be provided for the provider to deliver critical messages and practices directly. Still, as we know, the mental side of performance happens every day and all the time.

To clarify this, I will examine four specific areas related to team performance where the mental skills coach can support key individuals and deliver crucial work.

Coach support

The coaching group, particularly the head coach, will have the most significant influence on any team environment. Their messages shape the players’ mindsets, and if they have the tools, they can be effective real-time psychologists for the playing group.

They must also navigate the pressure of working in a results-based business as a group. Recent research has revealed that the coach’s well-being is a genuine concern. The hours they work, the consistently tough decisions they make, and the lack of ongoing job security create a recipe that challenges and, at times, compromises their mental health.

What this looks like day to day

• Help in shaping the key messages that will impact the environment
• Provide basic mental skills training that enables the coaching staff to shape mindset and empower athletes to navigate through pressure
• Work with the coaching staff on their well-being and energy levels to ensure they can navigate the pressure they face.

Player leadership group

An additional key group that drives the work is the senior playing group. We know that high-performing teams require high-performing leaders. These individuals wield significant influence and are often the “gatekeepers” who determine the rest of the team’s engagement. Their role is pivotal, and their impact is substantial. Without their “buy-in,” the work will fail to embed as it will depend on one individual driving everything.

What this looks like day to day

• Help core leaders learn more about leadership and enable them to become more comfortable with themselves as leaders.
• Meet regularly as a group to discuss the environment and what leadership demands they are collectively facing.
• One-on-one work with core leaders, supporting their growth as a leader and ensuring they are growing in their performance
• Provide the tools to help them regulate the group during pressure moments by using language and practices that are common to everyone.

Creating and maintaining an environment that empowers performance

Anyone involved in a team recognises the connection between environment and performance. Group dynamics and how people feel within a team have the most significant effect on mindset. We are hardwired to seek belonging and need to be connected to the team’s purpose, the people we work with, and what our role is that helps performance.

When these realities are met, people can pour their energy and focus into the team’s shared mission. They can lock into their role and the tasks they are asked to deliver. They can be themselves, feel respected and know that they matter. By feeling included, they become better teammates and performers.

We can provide all the tools, such as breathing, meditation, and visualisation, but we won’t get the most out of our people if we neglect these core needs.

What this looks like day to day

• Design and embed a cultural framework that captures the unique identity of the team and the standards and behaviours that ensure authenticity.
• Work with leaders to create numerous connections to the identity and expectations of the team.
• Monitor the environment and connect with individuals to ensure a sense of belonging, connection and alignment is happening.

Mental performance training

The final aspect to examine is mental skills training. I have written extensively about this in previous articles. However, we have a simple goal with this work: We want our athletes to be able to deliver their best when it matters most. Typically, this work has been viewed through the lens of one-on-one work. These are important, but there is also value in delivering group sessions.

I prefer to periodise these sessions, similar to preparing the body for a season. We can use The pre-season aims to build foundational mental principles and skills. Subjects like understanding pressure, where it comes from, and how it affects us are good starting points. The goal is to have everyone aligned and create clarity around what messages will be Important during the season. I like to keep these sessions to 10-15 minutes and create some. level of introspection and interaction. During the season, we can refer back to this foundation and make it relevant to what happens in any given week. This prevents us from flooding the players with new and unnecessary information.

I use the mental skills framework discussed in the second article for the one-on-one work. I go through this with each player each preseason and ask them to identify some areas they believe will be critical to their performance that year. This keeps the one-on-one focused and purposeful, avoiding another meaningless “catch-up” during the season’s business. We can adjust as needs arise, but the work is mainly strategic and avoids bouncing around subjects as a reaction to any given week.

What this looks like day to day

• Create a personal framework for each player that allows a strategic approach to their mental development throughout the year.
• Player group education sessions focus on specific elements of mental performance, addressing the team’s current needs based on a foundation built in pre-season.
• One-on-one sessions -Personal coaching sessions relevant to the athlete’s needs.

Reflection questions

1. Do you have clarity around the role of a mental performance coach and what is expected of them?
2. What are the key areas where you see a mental performance coach having an impact?
3. Are you providing enough time and space for this to occur?

Further reading:

Your Mental Skills Work Must Be Simple, Relevant and Applicable

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You may have a great performance structure for your men’s team, but simply cutting and pasting that to your women’s team does them a disservice.

That is the view of Arianna Criscione, the Head of Football Operations at Mercury/13 and Como Women. “It’s not enough,” she tells this Kitman Labs podcast. She explains that there are a range of services, from nutrition to psychology, that need to be tailored to women players.

Criscione continues: “You also have to have access to medical [support], but a lot of clubs don’t have access to a gynaecologist, which is a major part of the female body and really needs to be addressed a lot more.”

Dentistry is another area of oft-neglected consideration. “If you have an off-bite, that can actually affect your structure and how you’re running, which could cause injury.”

It is, as Sarah Smith says, about “making sure that we have a good foundation of support around our athletes.” Smith, who is the Director of Medical and Performance at Angel City FC in the NWSL, joins the conversation alongside Stephen Smith, the Founder of Kitman Labs.

In addition to discussing holistic female player development [10:45], the trio delve into bridging the gap in data and understanding in women’s football [15:45]; how talent identification is evolving [20:15]; as well as the existing disparities in data collection [28:10] from club to club and league to league.

This is episode two of a three-part series. Please go back and check out episode one, where the Leaders Performance Institute and Stephen Smith spoke to Paul Prescott of the International Football Group and Morten Larsen of Danish Superliga side Aarhus discussing talent pathways in the Premier League and beyond.

Further listening:

Kitman Labs Podcast: What Factors Drive Talent Development in the Premier League and Beyond?

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

By Aaron Walsh

While no-one doubts that mental skills are important, conversations with colleagues led me to believe that mental skills programs were rarely integrated successfully.

I wanted to understand the perceived gap between value and impact and embarked on a research project whereby I contacted 35 head coaches and performance directors and asked three questions.

The first two were ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions:

• Do you think mental skills play an important role in the overall performance of your team?
• Do you currently have a strategy to integrate this work into your team environment?

The third question was open-ended:

• What major obstacles prevent mental skills from being integrated into your team?

One of my significant findings was that the information delivered to the players, coaches, and staff wasn’t consistently effective. This is understandable; psychology is a vast subject, and translating the principles that underpin the work can be difficult. However, the last thing a provider wants to do is add a layer of complexity for athletes who already have the burden of processing a lot of information.

To address this, I will examine a couple of areas we can focus on to ensure the content we deliver is meaningful and impactful. We want it to enhance performance and provide the necessary information, tools, and support for our players and staff to perform at their best when pressure is present. The first area of focus is determining what content is needed for our teams.

To illustrate this, I will look at the different natures of the sports our athletes participate in and how that shapes what we engage them with.

Looking for the clues

When determining what content to deliver, our first reference point will be something other than a textbook or theory. We will use what we know about psychology extensively, but we need to ask a more critical question before we dive into it.

What are the mental demands of the sport? 

This seems a simple question, but it forces us to eliminate supercilious issues and allows us to identify where we can bring value to the athlete. To help us answer this question, I have divided sports into three categories. The reason for doing this is the nature of the sport will tell us what challenges the athlete is likely to face.

The categories below are not black and white in their definition; for example, in some sports, you have moments when you are required to initiate the movement (A lineout throw in Rugby, a free kick in football, a free throw in basketball). Still, most of the time, you are responding to movement. In other sports, you only initiate the movement (golf, archery, jumps in athletics).

Defining these challenges allows us to tailor our content to meet those needs. In other words, we become relevant.  For the sake of brevity, I will define the mental challenges of the sports involved and give three mental skills to enhance performance. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list but rather a snapshot identifying the demands and skills required to succeed.

1. Endurance sports

The name and nature of endurance sports give us immediate insight into their challenges. How do you mentally stay engaged in a mundane task that is causing significant pain?!! Endurance athletes are different beasts. To be successful, they must develop the ability to tolerate discomfort and resist the temptation to back off or quit. This becomes essential during long-duration efforts.

Key mental skills required

• Managing focus: The ability to maintain attention on the task so the athlete can push through fatigue and distractions during long events.
• Self-talk: Encouraging and affirming internal dialogue to counteract negative thoughts, especially in challenging moments.
• Adaptability: Being flexible and able to adjust plans or strategies in response to unexpected conditions (weather, terrain, etc.)

2. Sports where you respond to movement

Most sports require the athlete to respond to movement to be successful. This includes both a moving ball and opposition. The nature of the games, from basketball to football to rugby, is fast-paced, and participants must make numerous decisions under fatigue and pressure. This is often accompanied by strategic demands, with various game plans that must be executed for the team to perform well. As the introduction mentions, these sports are intertwined with moments where the athlete must initiate the movement.

Key mental skills required

• Clarity: Being clear on the athlete’s role in the team, understanding the key areas to focus on, and being aware of crucial game plan responsibilities.
• Decision-making: Ability to make the right decision at the right time. The clarity above needs to be married to in-game calmness. It will be necessary to trust their instincts and preparation for this to occur.
• Moving on quickly: Mistakes will occur in a fast-paced game where multiple decisions are made. Athletes must be able to reset mentally, let go of the past, and refocus on the next task they need to excel in.

3. Sports where you initiate movement

These tend to be the sports where perceived mental failure occurs. How many of us have watched an athlete with a putt to win or a kick to seal victory, and those athletes succumb to pressure? What makes these sports so demanding is that you have time to think when you initiate the movement. Unlike responsive sports, where you are primarily instinctive and reactive, these sports ask the athlete to prepare for a difficult task, fully aware of what is at stake.

Key mental skills required

• Pre-performance routine: Most of the tasks in these sports are repetitive. Even if the environment in which they function has variables, they would typically be described as closed skills. A consistent routine underpinning the task allows the athlete to build a process for dealing with pressure.
• Task focus: having time before the movement is initiated gives space for the athlete’s thoughts to wander. They can drift to the outcome and the potential consequences of failure. The routine explained above gives a place for the thoughts to land; by focusing on the task and the associated requirement, they can mitigate against the temptation of outcome distraction.
• Staying present: When you are required to repeat an action numerous times, it’s difficult not to be impacted by the past. If an athlete remembers a poor shot, throw, or kick, it can significantly affect the next one. Therefore, the athlete must be able to reset and stay engaged with the present demands.

One further layer of having demand-based content is making it positionally specific. In a team sport, what will be required will be different. A goalkeeper will be different from a forward, and a front rower in Rugby will be different from a fly-half. A quarterback will be different from a lineman. The more we can dig into these demands, the more relevant our content will be.

Three principles to guide our content

The second aspect of enhancing engagement is related to how we present to the athletes. Once we identify what needs to be delivered, how do we maximise our time with the athletes so the work is meaningful to them?

Below are three principles I have leaned on to make this happen:

1. Simple — Psychology is a complex subject; however, there is no need to make the content inaccessible by using language and terms you don’t need to. You don’t need to impress them by demonstrating your knowledge of the subject matter.Additionally, I have made the mistake of presenting too much information. The more information you have, the greater the chances of being confused. If you keep the language simple and try to cover only a little, you enhance the audience’s ability to grasp the key messages.
2. Relevance — Any content we deliver must apply to the athlete’s needs. The athlete cannot integrate irrelevant mental skills into their performance. Not everything you know will be relevant to what they need. One good question for us to ponder is, “What do they need to know that is relevant to the challenges they will face?”
3. Applicable — The content needs to be translated into practical solutions. No one wants to be told they are “doing it all wrong” and then not have a roadmap for growth to occur. They should be able to walk out of a session with some tools they can apply to their performance that meet the demands they will face.

Reflection questions

• What are the mental demands of the sports you are engaged with?
• What mental skills will be critical to meet those demands?
• How do we ensure the information is simple, relevant and applicable?

Further reading

Your Team’s Mental Performance Program Will Only Be Effective with a Clear Strategy. Here’s What you Should Do