094: Dan Bigham on reverse engineering performance

Dan Bigham is an athlete of the highest order, principally in the disciplines of individual and team pursuit with multiple national and World cup titles. Recently Dan is taking a pop at Bradley Wiggins’ hour record too. But Dan has achieved this level of performance with a band of brothers who congregated together and plied their collective physical talents with a mindset of simply trying to ‘work performance out’. Dan is an engineer by training and spent numerous years working in motorsports and sports analytics using his big brain and curiosity to ask questions, explore, be willing to go off script in the pursuit of performance. Dan’s recent book Start at the End, tells the story of how he led this team to success using the principles of reverse-engineering. And while you’ll hear Dan get into the technical details of aerodynamics etc, you’ll also hear how this attitude has spilled or you could say has been applied to all aspects of personal and team performance too.  

Notes

Early introduction to a range of sports

Cycling interests increase and coincide with business development of Team KGS

Team Derbados!!!!

The closing of systems after initial success

Creating loss, fail at competition or training, questions decisions

Don’t be annoying

Marginal gains and not stretching too thinly

Separating the results from the process

Open conversations and feedback sheets shared with everyone clarity over metrics and selection 

Dan’s lesson on team organisation /dynamics: listening, decision making, attitude etc

Links

You can follow Dan on Twitter

https://twitter.com/DanBiggles22

Start at the end book 

https://www.shopforwatts.co.uk/products/start-at-the-end-book

You can get bonus content from me at Youtube, take a look at the link in the show notes - 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8W3kvAsvtDDsEayex-1i5A

On Twitter www.twitter.com/ingham_steve

Supporting Champions on;

Twitter www.twitter.com/support_champs

Linkedin, www.linkedin.com/company/supporting-champions

Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/supportingchampions