Performance Strategies & Stumbles

In this episode of Performance Strategies and Stumbles, I'm joined by Tom Clark. Tom spent 13 years as a performance coach in motorsport and Formula One, looking after the sleep, training, nutrition and recovery systems that keep a driver's output steady across a season that seems designed to wear them down. He holds a professional doctorate from Liverpool John Moores University focused on jet lag and travel fatigue in elite motorsport, and he has since founded Faze, a jet lag and travel performance platform used across Formula One, the Premier League, the NFL, World Athletics and more.

We start by separating two things that usually get lumped together. Jet lag is a desynchronisation problem: the body clock is out of step with local time, and it shows up as irritability, poor sleep and impaired performance. Travel fatigue is the body's response to the stress of travelling itself, and it can build up even when no time zones are crossed. Treat one as the other and you end up solving the wrong problem.

From there, Tom explains why travelling east is a much tougher physiological ask than travelling west, and covers the two biggest levers coaches actually have: light exposure and sleep pressure. We talk about why flight timing alone can decide whether athletes adjust smoothly or lose days to disrupted sleep, why pre-adjustment is so hard to deliver in a team setting, and how the first night effect can undermine even a well-managed trip.

The thread running through all of it is individualisation. Athletes have different sleep patterns and chronotypes, so a single travel plan for the whole squad will suit some of them and cost others. We finish on the mistakes Tom sees teams make when they treat travel as a logistics problem rather than a performance one.

Tom is back next week to share the stumbles from his career and what you can learn from his mistakes.

Before then, do check out how his company Phaze is supporting teams and organisations to optimise performance in this area: www.phaze-app.com/

Collaborate 360 Performance Workshops: now regional

After Collaborate 360 in London, it was clear that one day in one city wasn't enough. So we've launched regional, single-topic workshops built on the same learning model: you learn by doing. There's one specialist coach, one room of practitioners, and it's close enough to home that going deep doesn't cost you a full day of travel.

Our first workshop is on Wednesday 28th October at Hertfordshire Sports Village. The focus is game speed, and it's led by Ruth Waghorn from the FA. More regions will be announced soon.

Early bird pricing is open now. Book your place: www.collaboratesports.com/workshops

In this episode of Performance Strategies and Stumbles, I'm joined by Jonas Dodoo for a conversation that has less to do with method than with the thing underneath it: how a coach actually learns, and how much of that learning arrives as a mistake you didn't see coming.

We start where most coaching education doesn't, with the early stumbles. Not the tidy version told in hindsight, but the decisions that cost something at the time and only made sense years later. Jonas is open about his, and the pattern that emerges is worth sitting with — the errors rarely came from not knowing enough, they came from communicating badly or committing too early.

From there we get into communication as a skill in its own right rather than a soft add-on to the real work. Feedback is the clearest example: whether it's constructive has as much to do with how it lands as how it's delivered, and a coach who hasn't considered the receiver's position is essentially guessing. That runs straight into the line between directing an athlete and empowering one, and how easily practitioners drift to one side without noticing they've done it.

The part I keep coming back to is his case for inquiry. Understanding methods you don't use, and being able to argue for them, is not a detour from developing your own philosophy — it is the thing that develops it. The alternative is over-commitment, where belief in a system quietly starts limiting the athlete in front of you, and Jonas is direct about how often that happens and what it costs. Context matters here too: what counts as good coaching is partly defined by the environment you're standing in, which is why adaptability travels better than loyalty to a model.

We finish on the long game, what injuries and setbacks teach that a well-run block never will, and why the practitioners who develop fastest tend to be the ones who stayed somewhere long enough to live with the consequences of their own decisions.

Stay up to date about our future performance workshops!
Get first access to upcoming workshops built for high performance coaches and practitioners. Real-world skills, applied immediately. Click here to learn more https://collaboratesports.activehosted.com/f/79

In this episode of Performance Strategies and Stumbles, I'm joined by Jonas Dodoo, a speed specialist whose work sits at the point where multi-directional speed, deceleration and change of direction stop being a collection of drills and start being a set of principles you can actually coach from.

Jonas works from four core principles, and the first does most of the heavy lifting: forces in the right direction. Not more force, not harder force, force applied where the task in front of the athlete actually needs it. A lot of what gets diagnosed as a speed problem turns out to be an orientation problem, and once you see it that way the session you write looks different.

From there we get into what has to hold for any of that to transfer. Pelvic and trunk control comes up repeatedly, less as a stability buzzword than as the thing that decides whether force reaches the ground in a useful shape or leaks out sideways. Then load management and pre-tension, how you prepare tissue to accept force rather than absorb it by accident, which is where the injury conversation and the performance conversation stop being separate topics.

The part I keep coming back to is his framework for diagnosis: is this a physical limitation or a co-ordinative one? Can the athlete not produce the force, or can they not organise it? Get that wrong and you spend a block in the gym on a problem that was never in the gym. Jonas is clear that most common coaching mistakes trace back to skipping that question, and he's blunt about the misconceptions that keep circulating in the deceleration and change-of-direction space.

We finish on the long game, how coaching relationships and mentorship compound over years, and why the practitioners who develop fastest tend to be the ones who stayed somewhere long enough to see the consequences of their own decisions.

Stay up to date about our future performance workshops!
Get first access to upcoming workshops built for high performance coaches and practitioners. Real-world skills, applied immediately. Click here to learn more https://collaboratesports.activehosted.com/f/79

In this episode of Performance Strategies and Stumbles, I'm joined by Tim Roberts  Sports Medicine Manager at UFC Performance Institute, Mexico City for a conversation about the road that got him there: the countries, the systems, the athletes, and the mistakes he still thinks about years later.

This one leans into the stumbles. Tim is unusually willing to name his own a diagnosis he got wrong, a rehab that didn't hold, decisions he'd make differently now that he can see the whole arc of a career rather than the week in front of him. What comes out of it isn't a list of errors so much as a way of working: he talks about loading aggressively within safe limits, and it's clear that position was earned by having once been too cautious and watching what that cost an athlete. The failures are where his practice actually got built.

A big thread here is what happens when you move. Working across different international settings sounds glamorous until you land somewhere and realise the model that made you effective in the last place doesn't transfer — the medical system works differently, the club structure works differently, the expectations of what a practitioner is even for work differently. Tim's argument is that the first job in a new environment isn't to improve it, it's to understand it: how referrals actually happen, who holds the trust, what "normal" looks like locally. Cultural adaptation, in his telling, is less about language than about knowing whose system you've walked into.

From there we get into leadership how he learned to give and receive feedback, how trust with coaches and athletes gets built long before an injury forces the issue, and what changes when you're responsible for a team rather than a caseload. He's candid about the parts of that transition nobody prepares you for.

There's a real thread of humility running through this conversation. Tim's practice looks the way it does because of the places he's worked and the things that went wrong in them, and he's more interested in what he's still getting wrong than in defending what he's already learned.

Stay up to date about our future performance workshops!

Get first access to upcoming workshops built for high performance coaches and practitioners. Real-world skills, applied immediately. Click here to learn more https://collaboratesports.activehosted.com/f/79

In this episode of Performance Strategies and Stumbles, I'm joined by Tim Roberts — Sports Medicine Manager at UFC Performance Institute, Mexico City — for a conversation about rehabilitation in combat sport and what it actually takes to get a fighter back to competing.

At the heart of this conversation is a deliberate shift in language: return to fight, not return to play. It sounds like semantics until you sit with what a fight actually demands — a weight cut, a date that can't move, an opponent whose job is to find the thing you've just rehabbed. Tim's argument is that if the language doesn't reflect the end point, neither will the process. Rather than starting with protocols, he starts with the impairment itself and what the athlete is actually being asked to return to.

We get into the psychological side of rehab and why it isn't a bolt-on to the physical work — including how keeping an injured fighter around the gym protects the identity that injury tends to strip out. From there, Tim walks through the distinction between early and mid-stage rehab and why collapsing the two is where a lot of programmes come unstuck, how he thinks about structuring intensity and volume as the athlete progresses, the value of simulating fight situations rather than testing in clean conditions, and what a genuine set of return-to-fight criteria looks like when it accounts for physical, technical and mental readiness rather than just one of the three. He's also candid about the time pressure combat athletes carry compared to team-sport environments, where a missed camp isn't a missed weekend — and about the communication and collaboration between sports medicine staff and coaches that has to hold up under it.

There's a real thread of humility running through this conversation — the sense that good rehab is less about owning a protocol than about asking better questions of the athlete in front of you, and Tim's point that mentorship in this space is worth more to a practitioner than almost anything else they can go looking for.

Episode Sponsor — Absolute Performance

This episode is supported by Absolute Performance — gym facilities designed to inspire, built to perform. Absolute Performance design and build performance spaces that push boundaries, set standards, and inspire greatness, maximising potential and performance for people and teams in every space they touch.

Their website is HERE.

Stay up to date about our future performance workshops!

Get first access to upcoming workshops built for high performance coaches and practitioners. Real-world skills, applied immediately. Click here to learn more https://collaboratesports.activehosted.com/f/79