How do you sleep?

How often do you think about and reflect on your sleep as an athlete? Maybe once or twice a month, maybe in passing as you bemoan how tired you are feeling before training? For something that we do for several hours every day of our lives, sleep is often relegated to an afterthought, something that we have to do but if anything is a bit of an inconvenience.

My name is Sandy and I was previously a sprinter for Bath University and Scotland. Having left the sport through inj…

Author Biography:

Name: Brydon Duncan

Age: 17

Event: Discus Throw

Performance Level: National Level

Contribution topic area: Mental Health

Who Am I?

My name is Brydon Duncan, I’m from Bromley, south-east London and I’m approaching my 18th birthday. I started athletics in 2019, as an upper U15. The reason I started doing discus is largely due to the fact that I was so much bigger than my peers, throughout my entire childhood. I’ve always been a large person, reaching 6ft tall before my 13th birthday, an…

📸 by Jodi Hanagan

I. Am. Fed. Up.

Fed up of hearing sports commentators discuss a professional athlete’s weight, size and body shape. Fed up of watching runners – and more importantly, friends – lose their way in the sport in attempts to achieve some sort of aesthetic or “ideal.” Fed up of hearing how scary sugar and fat and carbohydrate is. Fed up of being unable to help.

I’m fed up of the obsession we have with athlete’s bodies. Do they have a period? Have they lost/gained weight? Are they eating…

📸 by Jodi Hanagan

Post-viral fatigue syndrome is nothing new. Yet in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become a far more prevalent issue, with swathes of people struggling to make a full recovery from the initial infection. Dubbed “long Covid”, the drawn-out symptoms include severe fatigue, breathlessness, and anxiety. Below, I share my experience of post-viral fatigue, how I failed to avoid it, and what I am going to do differently this time around to ensure I don’t make the same mistak…

Let me start by saying, not a single professional athlete on the planet is healthy. Is it healthy to put that much stress through your knee every time you jump onto a high jump bed? Or the amount of physical pain you endure training for an Olympic 10,000m? Or bending your arm into all sorts of wacky positions to ping a javelin 90m? None of this, in the long run will make you any healthier. It does however mean, that we, as athletes, are the fittest people on the planet, and this is a distinction…

My life literally changed, forever.

Sir Steve Redgrave, Henry Slade and Muhammad Ali - what do they have in common? Yes, they are all international sporting superstars, but they are also type 1 diabetics, the condition that changed my life, forever.

From the moment they told me I might not be able to do gymnastics anymore, that was when I knew I was going to prove them wrong. My name is Abi. I am a final year student and an ex-international acrobatic gymnast, and on the 11^th Sept…

“Will I ever run again?”

It was the first question I remember asking when I woke up from a week long coma.

My name is Emma. I’m the athletics programme manager at Loughborough University and used to be a half decent sprinter. I made it to a few British Championships finals, picked up some medals along the way, and competed for England and GB U23s back in the day.

In July 2014 I was 29 and winding down from high level competition. I’d moved from…

📸 by: @Sakurasportsmedia

What is RED-S?

RED-S stands for ‘Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport’. RED-S is caused when an individual’s dietary energy intake is insufficient to support the energy expenditure required for everyday health and optimal function once the cost of exercise has been considered [1]. In simple terms, energy expenditure > energy intake to a point where physiological function is impaired in the body’s bid to save energy (metabolic rate, menstrual function, bone health, immune s…

Credit Image: FatCamera/Getty Images

Rest-day fuelling has become somewhat of a taboo for many athletes out there. Being bombarded with science of what you should and shouldn’t do, cutting on carbs, forgetting the fats and worrying about protein in case you lose all your gains – we’ve all been there.

It is important to stress that how we eat on a rest day can actually impact the upcoming sessions, strength and endurance. Whilst exercise and training are essential for performance, rest is just as, …

Ah, December. It's cold, it's dark and training is getting harder. Whatever sport you do, December tends to represent the middle of winter training and probably a lot of time spent at the training ground. With 7 events to fit in, Heptathletes have learned a thing or two about long training days. With that in mind, here's some top multi-eventer tips for surviving those double (or triple!) session days.