About

 

About the EIS [32kb]

 The Team Behind Britain's Olympic Team

Who we are

At the EIS we think of ourselves as the team behind the team and deliver a range of performance impacting sport science and sport medicine services to over 40 Olympic and Paralympic sports along with a select number of non-Olympic sports, including Premier League Football, Premiership Rugby Union, Rugby League and Cricket. 

Example proof points:

• We have more than 250 practitioners that work with over 90% of Olympic and Paralympic sports, delivering 4,000 hours of support to over 1,500 athletes every week.
• At the Beijing Olympics, we worked with 65 of the 70 athletes (93%) that won a medal, including all of those who won gold and silver and 80% of those that secured bronze.
• We also worked with 16 of the 17 Paralympic sports represented by Parlaympics GB.

What we do

Improving performance is at the core of everything we do and our practitioners work daily with coaches and athletes as part of their elite performance programmes. We work in multi-disciplinary teams to provide a holistic service that supports coaches and Performance Directors (PDs) in helping to improve the training, preparation and performance of their athletes. 

What we do enables athletes to optimise training and practice; assists athletes to achieve peak performance at major tournaments, enables athletes and coaches to prevent, reduce and manage injuries; helps athletes and coaches to manage pressure and stress; and deploys performance enhancing technology, insight and analysis to enable athletes to develop strategies and tactics for competition.

Example proof points:

• In 2010, a team of EIS practitioners including a physiotherapist, an S&C coach, a nutritionist, a Doctor and a Bio-mechanist, developed a bespoke rehabilitation programme to enable Tri-athlete, Alistair Brownlee to recover from a stress fracture in his femur and at the same time re-model his running action and put in a place a new training regime to guard against a recurrence of the injury by building stability. 
• In 2011, the EIS developed a rehabilitation programme which enabled Bianca Walkden to compete at the Taekwondo World Championships in May 2011 despite picking up a knee injury in January of that year which was expected to keep her out for 6-9 months.
• In 2009, EIS physiotherapist, Ian Gatt, and Doctor Mike Loosemore developed and implemented a new method of wrapping a boxer’s hands that has subsequently seen a decrease in the number of hand injuries sustained by the GB Boxing squad.

How we do it

The services we provide aim to deliver performance improvements and are guided by the technical programme needs of PDs, coaches and athletes. The mix of practitioners we select to work with a sport is based on delivering the precise blend of skills and expertise to meet these requirements and contribute to performance improvements.

Having a network of more than 250 practitioners and a host of external associates that work daily with high-performance sport means the EIS possesses an unrivalled web of expertise.  It enables practitioners to seek advice, share knowledge and call upon capabilities, from inside and outside of the organisation, to help them address issues or problems and develop performance solutions. Put simply, our network means that if an EIS practitioner is not familiar with a particular problem they can easily call upon the expertise of someone that is.

We work with athletes and coaches daily at 15 high performance centres around the country and also travel the world with them to provide sport science and sport medicine support at training camps and championships.

Some of our key sites, which support a number of athletes across a range of sports, are based at: Bisham Abbey and Lilleshall National Sports Centres, Sportcity Manchester, EIS-Sheffield, the University of Bath, Loughborough University, Alexander Stadium Birmingham and Lee Valley Athletics Centre.    

Our practitioners cover a range of disciplines including: Sport Medicine, Physiology, Physiotherapy and Soft Tissue Therapy, Strength and Conditioning, Performance Nutrition, Performance Psychology, Performance Analysis, Biomechanics, Talent Identification and Performance Lifestyle. We also have a range of practitioners that work specifically with Paralympic sports.

Example proof points:

• We have nine staff from seven disciplines working on a daily basis with British Gymnastics and a further six delivering on an as-needs basis.
• In 2011, a team of five EIS practitioners, comprised of a nutritionist, physiotherapist, performance analyst, psychologist and Doctor, travelled with the men’s GB Boxing squad to the World and European Championships where it secured an unprecedented medal haul of two gold, four silver and two bronze.
• Of our 18 Sport and Exercise Physicians, 13 are on the General Medical Council (GMC) specialist register.
• In 2008 in Beijing, 60 EIS practitioners were part of, or worked with, Team GB at the Olympic and Paralympic Games and the pre-Games holding camps.

The benefits of working with the EIS

As the winning margins in elite sport become increasingly smaller and athletes and coaches search for the extra 0.01% that can secure a place on the podium or be the difference between silver and gold, the EIS has a proven track record of working alongside coaches to help athletes improve performance and contribute to the delivery of medal success.

Example proof points:

• We worked with every British gold and silver medallist at the Beijing Olympics.
• In our most recent feedback survey, 94% of sport governing bodies that work with EIS said the work of our practitioners had “significantly impacted positively on performance at international competitions”.
• In 2011, we worked with athletes that won medals at the World Championships in Rowing, Swimming, Diving, Gymnastics, Boxing, Judo, Athletics and Taekwondo.
• Following a bespoke rehabilitation programme, developed in conjunction with a team of EIS practitioners, Tri-athlete, Alistair Brownlee, made a successful return from a stress fracture of the femur in 2010 and in September 2011, he was crowned World Champion for the second time.
• In an interview with Boxing News in November 2011, GB Boxing’s Performance Director, Rob McCracken said: “Working with our coaches is our sport science and medicine team from the English Institute of Sport.  The team covers everything: medical issues and physio, strength and conditioning, nutrition, psychology, lifestyle and performance analysis and has been a massive factor in our success, giving our boxers a performance edge over their opponents.”