Leaders Performance Podcast

• Teamworks Podcast, Bianca Rech, FC Bayern Munich

  When Bianca Rech shares a decision with FC Bayern’s players, she knows instantly how it has landed.“You feel it,” says the Director of Bayern’s women’s programme. “You already know when you look at their faces. You’re like ‘I think she doesn’t like it’, ‘yeah, she likes it’ and ‘she needs a bit of proof’. It’s like sometimes I see myself sitting on the other side.”The ‘other side’, as Bianca tells Teamworks’ Andrew Trimble and Leaders’ John Portch, refers to her transition from a Germany international and Frauen-Bundesliga regular to a senior leader of the German champions, whom she represented on the pitch for four years.“It’s so much harder now when you sit on that side now,” she adds, reflecting on how she used to feel as a player. “I see myself sitting on the other side, like, ‘oh, maybe I have to talk to them again’.”In this third and final episode of our special series with Teamworks, Bianca touched upon several of the major themes that emerged from our recent Special Report High Performance Unpacked: interconnected performance teams.She spoke of her role in helping to transform the Bayern culture on and off the pitch [37:00]; keeping the athlete at the centre of the performance jigsaw [14:30]; the importance of sports psychology [31:00]; and the thoughtful integration of technology [21:00].Listen and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.Episode One: Simon Rice, the Philadelphia 76ersEpisode Two: Miranda Menaspà, the Australian Institute of Sport

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• Teamworks Podcast: Simon Rice, Philadelphia 76ers

  They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but does that hold up in the world of elite sports performance?“The issues I’ve seen here, they’re very rarely – almost never – [a result of] things getting missed,” Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, tells Teamworks’ Director of Athlete Performance Andrew Trimble and Leaders Performance Institute Editor John Portch.“Where we run into slight problems is everyone trying to do the right thing with really good intentions,” he continues, citing the hypothetical example of three practitioners on the Sixers' Health & Performance group prescribing the same loading plan to an athlete and inadvertently tripling their load.“It often comes back to communication and it comes back to this idea of fitting the puzzle pieces to fully support that player.”It takes mutual understanding and trust between athlete and coach, as Simon touched upon in the recent Teamworks and Leaders Special Report, entitled High Performance Unpacked: Interconnected Performance Teams, and it was a theme he expanded upon in the first episode of our new three-part series.Elsewhere, Simon also talks about the role of the performance director as a cultural leader [4:00]; the importance of establishing what’s best for the athlete right now [15:30]; the work of the Health & Performance group with external clinicians [34:00]; and how his team can give athletes confidence in their bodies through its joint decision model [55:00].Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

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• Lachlan Penfold, Melbourne Storm

  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 guard Steph Curry.“The player that embodies it better than anyone in world sport is Steph Curry in terms of just the absolute joy he gets from playing the game, from training the game,” Penfold continues, “not only from his perspective, but from seeing his teammates have success and do great things, the joy that he gets really invigorates a sporting team.”It has fed into his work with the Melbourne Storm, who reached the NRL grand final in October. No doubt they’ll go again in 2025, inspired by the family environment described so vividly by Penfold [10:00]. We also spoke about his approach to training and recovery [17:30] and the importance of individualised work [22:30]. Last up, we discussed the year ahead [28:10].Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

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• Flo Laing, Scotland Rugby

  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 – the second of three in this Keiser podcast series – we spoke about her work in women’s rugby at a time where the sport is starting to capture the public’s imagination and performance standards are rising faster than ever for the women players who compete [4:00].Elsewhere, Laing discusses her leadership style, which is very much about putting people at ease [18:00]; she also talks about the most pressing issues in female athlete health [28:40]; as well as the transferable skills she’s learned from her time working for Sport Scotland [12:30].Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

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• Duncan French, UFC

  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.

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