Leaders Performance Podcast

Lachlan Penfold’s time at the Golden State Warriors was eye-opening in numerous ways.Chief amongst them was his realisation that joy is crucial in a high performance environment.“Joy in a professional sport? That’s a bit strange,” thought Penfold, but it was one of the team’s trademarks and no-one embodied it better than their Head Coach Steve Kerr and illustrious point g

Flo Laing does not miss a beat in explaining what she’s most excited about heading into 2025.“It’s got to be the World Cup,” says Scotland women’s Lead Physiotherapist.The competition will be hosted across the border in England and starts in August. Laing says it has been the Scotland team’s “north star” for several years.During the course of our conversation – th

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 ha

Dan Jackson is the General Manager of Player Development & Leadership at the Adelaide Football Club, but he is quick to dispel any notions that he is a guru.“I can’t teach leadership,” he tells the Leaders Performance Podcast. “I can help unlock what’s already in there.”On that note, he is certain that leaders are not born. “Leadership is 100 per cent made, but it’s

Kitman Labs ensured Bayer Leverkusen knew what it took to win the German Bundesliga.They demonstrated to Dr Karl-Heinrich Dittmar, Leverkusen’s Head of Medical, the optimal range of player availability to top the table during a meet in Dublin, four or five years before Die Werkself actually won the title.“I kept this data; and last year we did it,” Dr Dittmar told the Kitman

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 psychol

More than 77 per cent of professional contracts in the Premier League and EFL are held by homegrown players.It wasn’t always thus. “English clubs were basically funding talent development models in Spain or in Brazil because English talent wasn’t seen to be at the same level as players from those countries,” Paul Prescott, the Managing Director of the International Football

The 2024 StatsBomb Conference took place at Old Trafford in Manchester in October and the Leaders Performance Institute was in attendance.We spoke to the great and the good of the football analytics world, including three people speaking that day, about their thoughts on data & analytics in football, from recruitment and time management to analysis and AI.Coming up for you, we have

Predictably, when Sport Wales formed its Female Health & Performance team, some asked why there was no male equivalent.The truth is that male physiology and psychology has long been viewed as the default across sport.“For so many years we haven’t thought about females as being different,” says Esther Goldsmith, who works for Sport Wales, on the latest episode of the Leaders P

Alex Hill has spent 13 years studying organisations that have out-performed their peers for over 100 years, including the All Blacks, Eton College and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The result is his book Centennials: The 12 Habits of Great, Enduring Organisations.“If you want society to support you long term, your impact has to be much broader than just creating role models,”