What can doctors learn from athletes about training for performance with Dr Alice McNamara and Dr Charlotte Durand

In S2E12 I am delighted to welcome Dr Alice McNamara and Dr Charlotte Durand to the podcast.
Alice is sport and exercise medicine registrar in Melbourne, Australia. She is also a dual world champion rower with over a decade of experience on the Australian women’s rowing team. She qualified for the lightweight women’s double for the London Olympic Games and attended the Beijing games as an alternate.
(Full Bio in episode. )
Charlotte is an emergency registrar working in Darwin, NT. She is also a triathlete and competed for Australia in the 2018 ITU world triathlon finals. (Again full bio in episode.)
In this conversation we discuss their respective backgrounds and careers to date in both sport and medicine and use as a platform to explore the themes of optimising performance and supporting wellbeing for doctors ( and indeed anyone looking to do this in their life). Alice and Charlotte use their experiences in sport and apply the performance lens to their medical training. They cover periodisation, deliberate practice, visualisation, coaching and mentoring and setting boundaries and recovery goals, topics familiar to listeners to this podcast. We explore parallels, similarities and differences between the athlete and doctor-in-training experience. Alice explains the concepts of physiological overreaching and the pathological overtraining syndrome and we compare and contrast to the profession syndrome of burnout.
In the second half of the conversation Alice speaks about her research with the AIS exploring female athlete heath and we discuss the Relative Energy Deficit in Sport ( RED-S), introducing concepts of energy availability in both female and male athletes, elite and recreational. This leads on to a more general conversation about fuelling and hydration for shift work and attention to self care and basic needs at work in the clinical environment.
The central themes of performance and wellbeing weave through this entirely of this conversation and both Alice and Charlotte share valuable perspective including many pearls and takeaways from their considerable experience and expertise.
I learned a lot from this conversation and it is a joy to listen to Alice and Charlotte share their authentic lived experience of performing and integrating sport, work and life as both athletes and doctors with a medical and sports science and psychology framework.
References and links :
Dr Alice McNamara
https://twitter.com/alice_mac6
https://www.instagram.com/_alice_mac/
Australian Institute of Sport FPHI website :
:Female Performance & Health Initiative | Australian Institute of Sport
ais.gov.
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/52/11/687.long
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33065594/
Dr Charlotte Durand
https://www.instagram.com/chardurand/
https://twitter.com/char_durand
https://www.acemprimarypodcast.com
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Disclaimer: The content in this podcast is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care professional. Moreover views expressed here are our own and do not necessarily reflect those of our employers or other official organisations.