Olly Logan

Hiya, my name's Olly Logan. I live in Northern Ireland but I work across England and Scotland. My job is a performance consultant working for elite sports, particularly in the Olympic and Paralympic space.

So most of my time at work is spent, I would say, performance problem solving would be the generic term that I would use.

Most of the questions that I get asked from coaches, athletes or other staff that work in the sports is, how do I get my athlete to go faster, jump higher, score more points? Basically, how do they improve their performance or reduce injury?

So then that's a question or a problem that we're looking to try and solve. And then we're trying to use, I suppose, various aspects of scientific principles, be that physics, maths, biology, to try and reverse engineer the problem.

So the athlete is here, for instance, they're scoring these points or swimming this time or running this time, and we want them to go half a second faster.

So we were looking to get from A to B by looking at the various components that make up that performance and trying to improve them technically or from a strength perspective or using various modalities and scientific principles.

Yeah, so a typical day would be I would be at a sports specific site.

So most of my work at the moment is with aquatic. So I would be poolside in some fashion.

I would be speaking with the coaches during the session. I might be working with the athletes, either recording them using camera systems or doing some technical analysis of them. And that information is then worked on post session.

And then the rest of my day might be involved in meetings, either online meetings or meetings with the local team at the site.

So those people in the team could be coach, physio, strength and conditioning coach, physiologist, and discussing the athlete group there and how they're getting on this week, for instance.

So fairly mixed in terms of practical meetings work, but admin and then also some localised meetings.

Yeah, so it's very much a collaborative approach.

So we work in what's called a multidisciplinary team. So it's a team of people from various different disciplines working together for the same common goal of improving performance. So again, most commonly, I work with the coach in the respect to sport, we'll work with the athlete, and they're central to everything that we do.

And if we consider these these practitioner or support services that support the coach and athletes around performance. So, things like applying mechanist, which is essentially the physics of sports movement.

You might have a performance analyst, which looks at the data from competition and tries to use data for decision making.

Then you'd have physiotherapist, strength and conditioning coach, sports psychologist, physiologist, even career or practitioners such as performance lifestyle advisors. So there's quite a wide team that support the group of coaches and athletes.

And part of my role is to translate performance within the pool or within the sports environment and make that relevant for the strength and conditioning coach and what they do or the physio and what they do.

So a lot of my role is kind of related to the sports specific to the discipline specific, because again, I try and straddle those two areas.

So the best thing about my job is there's a couple of things that I really enjoy.

I really enjoy the variance. Like I would say there are no two days that are the same because I work across different sports. So I get to see something different every day or different coaches and different athletes or just different problems. So we're always trying to solve a problem and help make somebody better.

The other aspect of my job is like I quite like traveling around, quite like seeing new places. So again, that's quite enjoyable. Although tiring, is quite enjoyable. the travel and just the varied nature of the role means, yeah, it's very difficult to be bored, I think, in the role.

So the hardest part of my job is, again, there's a couple of things.

It's both the best and the hardest part of the job is the travel can be quite draining. So I live in Northern Ireland, but I cover the length and breadth of mainland UK. So for this week, for instance, I was in Bath, Loughborough, Manchester. So, you know, it's quite a lot of travel in there. It can be quite draining.

The other hardest... Probably other two hardest parts of my role are time away from home. I have a young family. I spend significant amounts of time away from home and I miss the kids and the kids miss me. So trying to find that work-life balance can be difficult.

And it is quite demanding. We are, I suppose, a results-focused business. And sometimes that can be challenging when results aren't achieved and people don't achieve performance levels.

You know, your role is somewhat linked to performances every four years. So there can be some uncertainty over your role if results don't go that well.

Yeah, so I found my way into this job, partly by accident, I will say.

I was always interested in sciences and STEAM related subjects at school, particularly physics and maths. It was quite a curious mind. I was quite an active sports player. I was a hockey player.

It was my second, no, sorry, third year at university. I went to a guest lecture from a guy called Professor Steve Haake. And he was speaking about how sports engineering is used in performance sports and testing of, you know, sports equipment and all these different techniques and all these avenues that I was unaware of at that time.

And that really landed with me the opportunity to combine my interest in particularly physics with sports. So I spoke to him. He suggested a couple of avenues to research and look at.

And that ultimately set me on a path of doing a Masters in sports biomechanics. And I've never really looked back since.

So yeah, it's interesting. I never grew up wanting to work in sports. And yet here I am with a 20 year career behind me. So I'll put it kind of that down to one moment, this is definitely what I wanted to do.

Yes. So my education at school, I had a really good physics teacher. She was excellent. She fed my curiosity for understanding the world. And we did a lot of, I suppose, practical experiments and labs, et cetera. So I think she supported my kind of natural curiosity.

And similarly, again, in a maths you know, I was, was, it was identified that I was pretty good at maths and I was pushed on within maths and then to take on like further maths as well.

So I think predominantly people seeing the interest and motivation in me to, to explore these areas and kind of support them and support the curiosity and was good.

But also, I can't ignore the sports side, like I was pretty active in school and hockey and again, look, fortunately I was at a school where, you know, the sport was really supported so you know time out away from classes when we had big sport and fixtures, you know on the basis that you make up and you catch up so I think that balance is possible whilst difficult but that balance is possible and it fueled my interest in the areas.

So a moment of my career I'll never forget is probably the Tokyo Olympics and the swimming competition, the mixed medley relay. I'd been involved in a project for that specific event for about 18 months where the ambition was that we would win a gold medal and the secondary ambition was we would break a world record.

So I was involved in a project around data optimisation using data analytics to try and identify the best order, the best people and the best way in which to swim the race.

And then that fed into a number of different preparations for the relevant athletes and decision-making for who would put in the heat and who would put in the final.

And to come out of that with a gold medal and a world record, because whilst it's all the athletes and the coaches do all the work, the feeling that I had in terms of I know I've had a direct impact here, even if it was just a 1% or half a percent, feeling of satisfaction of I've done a really good job here, that's something that will always live with me.

What advice do I wish I had when I was younger? I would say probably a couple of pieces of advice.

One is to embrace every opportunity that gets put in front of you, because you never know which opportunity may lead on to something else.

I've been really fortunate enough to be given lots of opportunities off of the back of things that I didn't think were big and relevant at that time. But I guess sometimes it, it trips me up, but I tend to look at things in quite a positive glass half full, let's explore this, let's see where it leads to.

So yeah, you never, you never know where opportunities can take you. So that would be one piece of advice.

And the second, second piece of advice I would say is again, I suppose hard work and consistency really does get you a long way.

I've seen it in sport, I've seen it as well as like there are lots of talented people with natural abilities, but hard work and consistency often overrides that.

So turning up every day, some days you'll be motivated, some days you won't, but that consistency and that discipline, that hard work will get you pretty much anywhere you want to go if you're determined enough.