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Welcome to episode 0 of the Evolving Performance Podcast.
This is a project I’m really excited about that I’ve been working on in the background for a while now.
As a quick introduction, my name is Kevin Neeld, and I’m currently the Director of Performance for the Boston Bruins. Prior to working in pro hockey, I spent time with USA Hockey’s women’s national team, and as a director at a private sports training facility working with athletes across a wide range of levels and sports. In 2020, I got my PhD in Human and Sport Performance and continue to stay actively engaged in research through serving on committees for master’s and doctoral students.
Through these experiences, I’ve been fortunate to work with some all-time great athletes, and there’s a lot to learn about the different things these athletes do to be and stay great – whether its factors that are more outside the sport; things like the detail and effort they put into their training or the specific training methods they use. How they approach their nutrition and supplementation, how purposeful they are with their sleep. How they implement different recovery strategies, or the work they put into their mental preparation and mental skills.
Or things that fall more inside their sport – like their effort and intent in practice, how they spend extra time practicing a specific skill, how they break down and review their own film or study the habits of their opponents. There are countless examples, which I think is really exciting, because it means that there are a lot of opportunities for athletes to continue to find ways to improve.
The other thing that’s become really apparent to me is how athletes can have very different responses to the same strategy. For example, I’ve had athletes in the past tell me that doing a low volume of speed work the day before a game makes them feel faster, and others tell me they feel like they have no legs at all. We can dive into why that may be another time, but recognizing that there are a lot of different strategies athletes can use to improve their performance, that multiple strategies can lead to similar outcomes and that athletes may respond differently to any given strategy, and also that athletes may have preferences for certain methods over others the reality is…
the more strategies athletes and coaches are equipped with, the better they can navigate new challenges and continue to push their development and their performance.
And that’s the main goal of this podcast – to identify topics that can have a meaningful impact on an athletes performance, their durability, their adaptation to training and their career longevity – and to bring on experts on those specific topics to help share practical insights that athletes and people working with athletes can start implementing immediately.
I’ve been very fortunate across my career to network with some incredible performance coaches, rehab and medical professionals, researchers and educators, athletes and coaches that we’ll welcome as guests on the podcast so you can benefit from their knowledge and experience like I have.
One of my other big goals with this is to involve you as much as possible. It’s important to me that the guests I bring on and the information shared on the podcast are actually helping you. So you, as the listener, will have a say both in what guests come on and what topics and questions we discuss. To start, I’ll be posting these types of requests for guests or questions for specific guests through my Instagram account, which is just @KevinNeeld, so be sure to give me a follow there to keep up to date.
So if you’re an athlete or you work with athletes, this podcast is going to be a great resource to help you learn new or more efficient ways to keep evolving your game.
So click the subscribe link on youtube, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you prefer to listen, and
Stay tuned for episode 1!