It’s been eight months since the official opening of St George’s Park in Burton-upon-Trent, but the excitement over England’s new National Football Centre has hardly died down.
Uniting all of England’s national football teams for the first time under one roof, the £105m facility serves as the Football Association’s centre of excellence, training not only existing and future England international players, but also new football coaches who will be inculcated with the FA’s vision of the future of English football.
But St George’s Park doesn’t just cater for the needs of England’s top footballers. The facility is also home to Perform, a 23,230sq m (250,000sq ft), £1.4m state-of-the-art sports medicine, rehabilitation and performance centre operated by Spire Healthcare. It’s one of the most advanced sports performance facilities in the UK – and is accessible to everyone, from high-profile athletes and amateur teams to corporate groups, schools and the local community.
We talk to Phil Horton, director of Perform, to find out more about the centre’s mission and services.
Q. What are the objectives of St George’s Park?
On one hand, St George’s Park aims to provide a permanent home for English football, to improve the quality of the game, develop the professionalism of coaching and refereeing, and to improve the development of footballing talent among England’s youth.
On the other hand, St George’s Park also aims to be a centre of excellence in sports science and medicine that’s open to everyone, offering medical screening, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation for human performance.
Q. How did the idea of setting up Perform, a world-class sports performance centre at St George’s Park, come about?
Spire Healthcare has a long tradition of providing the highest standards of private healthcare in the UK. Through market research, we began to recognise that there was a need for the provision of sports medicine, rehabilitation and performance, and developed a new sports medicine brand called Perform.
While we were researching Perform, the FA had just begun its search for a healthcare partner for St George’s Park. We were enormously excited by this opportunity, as we instantly recognised it would give us the chance to create a world-class centre of excellence.
In autumn 2011, we were selected by the FA as its partner and immediately began work at St George’s Park – alongside other partners such as Technogym, the official fitness equipment supplier – to create this unique, accessible, multi-disciplinary facility that’s dedicated to enhancing human performance.
Perform pulls together everything that Spire has learned about sports medicine over the past 30 years. We work with some of the finest sports and exercise physicians in the country, and Perform at St George’s Park provides them with the tools to do the job: cutting-edge fitness equipment underpinned by carefully designed protocols that put the patient at the heart of what we do.
Q. What’s the vision and philosophy behind Perform at St George’s Park?
The vision of Perform is to be a world-class, internationally-renowned centre of excellence for sports and exercise medicine, performance science, injury rehabilitation and also strength and conditioning.
Our mission is to bring together the best people, all dedicated to developing excellence and delivering the highest quality outcomes – helping people achieve performance beyond their expectations, for sport, for life and for work. We have therefore staffed Perform at St George’s Park with top-class sports medics and sports scientists to maximise the impact of the state-of-the-art facilities.
Perform is open to all individuals, not just the professional sports world. The general public, as well as corporates, can access the rehabilitation and sports science facilities, whether on a self-pay basis or through private medical insurance. ‘Perform for Life’ and ‘Perform for Work’ are health assessment packages available to ensure that individuals and company employees ‘know their health numbers’.
Once we have a picture of their health, we can then link this into their personal goals, performance objectives and help them Perform.
Q. What kind of facilities are on offer?
We run a strength and conditioning gym, overlooking the Wembley replica pitch, that’s dedicated to building stamina, strength, endurance and muscle tone. It’s equipped by Technogym with best-in-class equipment ranging from Excite+ cardio and Group Cycles to Kinesis Stations, Arke, dual-adjustable pulleys and Pure Strength machines. There are also ESPT Total Power racks.
We also have a specialist rehab gym, with equipment including Technogym’s brand new Selection Med Leg Press and Kinesis One. There’s also a Batak board, aeroflooring, functional training equipment and pilates equipment – all overlooking an indoor 3d pitch and 100m sprint lane.
Vital to our work is the full sports science assessment Human Performance Lab, which includes an altitude chamber with a Run Med Treadmill, Med Bike and Group Cycles from Technogym, alongside Wattbikes and an Alter G anti-gravity treadmill. It’s also equipped with Cosmed and Medgraphics Metabolic Cart, which fully link to the Technogym medical equipment.
All three gyms are integrated with Technogym’s Mywellness Cloud, a wireless technology software application that allows users and their trainers to view and analyse their personalised goals, training programmes and progress. The accelerometer-based Mywellness Key is also used by corporate clients, allowing us to monitor and manage employees’ daily movement/physical activity when they’re away from our facilities.
Further to this, a hydrotherapy suite offers a multi-purpose area that can be used for everything from recovery and rehabilitation, through cardiovascular workouts, to gait analysis to name but a few. The suite consists of a Variopool, contrast therapy pool and a HydroWorx underwater treadmill.
Q. How do you balance the needs of elite users and Joe Public in one venue?
We offer best-in-class services and solutions that can be scaled up or down to suit different customers. By providing elite medical expertise, combined with leading technology, we analyse and track the needs and performance of each and every user, regardless of their level, with the aim of enabling each individual to perform at their very best.
We cater for athletes in all sports disciplines and at all levels, from school teams within the local community to elite athletes and, of course, England’s 24 national football teams, from junior to senior levels. We also work with corporate groups that are trying to improve the overall health and wellbeing of people within their organisations.
Q. What sort of expertise do you have in-house?
All of Perform’s services are delivered by an expert team led by clinical director Dr Charlotte Cowie and Steve Kemp, our elite physiotherapist. Dr Cowie has amassed an impressive 20-year career in sports medicine, with experience not only in football medicine but also numerous other sports such as tennis, athletics, synchronised swimming, boxing and cycling.
She was previously medical officer to the English women’s football squad, and head of medical services at Tottenham Hotspur FC and Fulham FC. Most recently, during London 2012, she worked as part of Team GB at her third Olympic Games.
Kemp is a member of the Musculoskeletal Association of Chartered Physiotherapists (MACP) and a gold-accredited member of the Association of Chartered Physiotherapists in Sports Medicine (ACPSM). He has over 12 years of experience as a physiotherapist in a sports environment, with recent elite football clinical experience as head of medical services for Wolverhampton Wanderers. He has also worked as a private physiotherapist with athletes from many other sporting professions.
Q. What are your future plans for Perform?
We recently announced an exciting partnership with Michael Johnson Performance, founded by four-time Olympic Champion and current 400m world record holder Michael Johnson. The partnership brings together two teams of world-class performance coaches and sports and exercise scientists, who work daily with elite athletes across the globe. It will be the first time young people in Europe will have the chance to perform and train using MJP coaching techniques outside of an academy environment, using the best testing and training equipment usually reserved for elite athletes.
This forms part of our commitment not only to develop the future generation of England’s sporting stars, but also to make Perform’s services accessible to everyone. Our development is still in its early stages, but we plan to continue growing and expanding Perform and the packages we offer by building more relationships and affiliations with teams, organisations and individuals, bringing together the finest minds in sports, medicine and healthcare to serve people in a sustainable, financially viable way.
