Insights on performance, training, and human factors

I’m currently coaching an athlete to sharpen his 5k time before we move to a Tough Mudder focus from Spring. It’s early days, even though we’ve been training together since November, but the ‘serious’ coaching has started since being back at work in the New Year.   When we started off, I was prescribing his workouts on a spreadsheet. It was the same way his last coach did it, and it’s a free, uncomplicated way to tabulate his training plan. It had his paces, distances and an

In safety critical work, fatigue is a hot topic of discussion. Risk management often identifies it as a threat to safety and leaders are beginning to understand (and appreciate) that actively managing peoples’ rest is key. The same applies to performance. Athletes train regularly, subjecting their body to increased physical loads, with the aim of improving their performance. This improvement comes from the body’s ability to rebuild stronger, and where does that rebuild occur?

In every high-performance environment - whether it’s the cockpit, the boardroom, or the running track - feedback is the currency of improvement. Yet too often, feedback is misunderstood. It’s treated as criticism, or worse, ignored completely. The truth is that feedback isn’t about judgement; it’s about adaptation . It’s the mechanism that allows humans to refine skill, improve focus, and make better decisions under pressure. That’s why I developed the Focus Feedback Cycle -

Stress has a bad reputation. We hear the word and immediately think of overwhelm, fatigue, or burnout. But in both sport and business,...

This month I’ve had quite a focus on adapting to change. I’ve introduced my ADAPT model , looked into why we as humans are resistant to change and how change helps athletes to improve their performance . Now I’m taking my own advice and pausing to see how I’m making changes to continue growing as a coach and athlete. In the past, I’ve worked with a triathlon coach who got me over that initial hurdle of juggling three sports in one event, and we worked well together over this

Kelvin Kiptum of Kenya holds the male world record for the marathon. His time? 2:00:35. He can run 42.2km (26.2 miles) in seconds over 2 hours. That’s running 2:51 per km (or 4:36 per mile) for 2 hours. Not only was he the first person to get under 2:01 for the marathon, but he also ran the second half faster than the first half (called a negative split). While training for this feat, Kelvin would have put his body through progressive stress, time and time again. Breaking dow

We, as humans, are creatures of habit. It’s a mindset embedded within us from our days as hunter gatherers (and probably well before...

Change is the only constant - in sport, aviation, and life. Yet most people treat it as something to survive, not something to train for....

As humans, we know a remarkably large amount of what’s going on around us. We see everything, hear everything, taste everything, smell...

In high-stakes environments - like aviation, emergency response, sport, and leadership - we talk a lot about situational awareness. But...

Aviation is one of the safest industries in the world - not by accident, but by design. Through decades of hard-earned lessons, aviation...

I joined the RAF back in 2016, after the findings of Haddon-Cave’s Nimrod review . The changes to culture were already well and truly...

The crossover between sport and professional performance is one that I hold at the core of my coaching philosophy. It’s why I train athletes and professionals with a similar approach. Lessons identified in one area can be related across and applied to enhance performance. Let me prove it to you... In mid-May, I packed my bike onto the back of my car, loaded up my wetsuit and running shoes and made my way to Burghley House in Stamford. The whole way my stomach was churning wit

In today’s fast-paced world, we send more messages - but understand less. Whether it’s a WhatsApp from a coach, a safety note in...

In aviation, sport, and leadership, few things erode trust faster than blame. In high-performance environments, where human error is...

As human beings, we are all fallible. Mistakes occur, despite knowing every Human Factor at play and identifying the potential for errors...

How many times do we see it in our day-to-day lives? Whether its an email to our boss that they took the wrong way, or a text to a family...

While flying recently, I was handling the aircraft on an instrument approach in for a touch and go. I was wearing the oxygen mask, as we...

Communication always comes with its challenges, but there are ways we can overcome these and avoid ambiguity.

Technology is used in today’s society as both a help and a hinderance. We utilise it in all aspects of our lives, and sleep is no...