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About Us

At Martel Performance, our mission is to revolutionise athletic health. With
over three decades of experience, we’ve provided elite athletes and teams
with tailored solutions for success on and off the pitch.

Built to Meet the Demands of Modern Sport

Our Story

Martel Performance was founded with a clear vision – to meet the ever -growing demands of modern-day athletes. Today’s athletes face more challenges than ever, from gruelling schedules and long-distance travel to managing their nutrition, recovery, and sleep. We recognise that excelling in elite sports requires more than just talent – it demands a holistic approach to health.

Our founders, who are experts within their respective fields, came together to address these needs. With deep roots in nutrition, sleep science, and sports recovery, we’ve built a company that integrates all aspects of athletic health into a cohesive programme. Our focus is on providing personalised solutions that are simple yet highly effective, helping athletes consistently perform at their peak.

WarringtonWolves
NHS
ManCity
Liverpool
Everton
England Rugby
England Netball

Unmatched Expertise, Proven Results

Why Choose Martel?

What Sets Us Apart?

At Martel Performance, we believe that true success comes from working in unison. Our approach brings together the three essential pillars of athletic health – nutrition, sleep, and recovery. By combining these elements, we provide a comprehensive solution that is tailored to the unique needs of every team and athlete.

Our expertise isn’t just theoretical; it’s built on years of hands-on experience working with elite teams across various sports. We understand the pressures and demands athletes face, and our bespoke programmes are designed to optimise performance, reduce injury risks, and promote long-term success.

At Martel Performance, we believe that true success comes from working in unison. Our approach brings together the three essential pillars of athletic health – nutrition, sleep, and recovery. By combining these elements, we provide a comprehensive solution that is tailored to the unique needs of every team and athlete.

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YOHAN

“After years of suffering & not knowing why I am the way I am, Dr Saagar Patel gave me validation. I felt very comfortable and he was very empathetic and has shown great care towards my self. I cant thank him enough. He gave me reassurance and gave me a plan to stick to live my life again. I highly recommend Dr Saagar Patel thank you very much...”

Your Performance Hub At Your Fingertips

Martel Performance Guide

Professionals Dedicated to Your Athletic Health

Who...

Meet the experts behind Martel Performance—a team of dedicated professionals specialising in sports performance, nutrition, recovery, and sleep optimisation. Each member brings a wealth of experience and passion, committed to helping athletes achieve their highest potential. Our specialists understand the unique demands of competitive sports and work closely with you to develop personalised strategies that align with your goals.

 

Whether you are a seasoned athlete or just beginning your journey, our team is here to provide the expertise, insight, and support you need to succeed. With Martel Performance, you are not just working with coaches; you’re partnering with seasoned professionals who are invested in your progress. Join us to benefit from guidance that’s grounded in science, tailored to your needs, and focused on your success.

Tailored Solutions for Every Athlete

What...

At Martel Performance, we offer a comprehensive set of services designed to optimise every aspect of athletic health. Our tailored programmes focus on the essential pillars of sports success—nutrition, recovery, and sleep—ensuring that you’re prepared to meet the demands of your sport with confidence. Whether you need bespoke nutrition plans, expert guidance on sleep strategies, or recovery protocols to keep you performing at your best, we have you covered.

Our approach is science-backed and personalised, crafted to address your unique needs and goals. Through a combination of expert advice, practical tools, and ongoing support, we empower athletes to go beyond their limits. Martel Performance is here to help you achieve your full potential, no matter where you are in your athletic journey.

Performance Access at Your Fingertips

Where...

Martel Performance brings expert support to you, wherever you are. Our user-friendly online platform provides seamless access to personalised guidance, advice, and resources, all tailored to help you achieve your goals. With just a few clicks, you can connect with our specialists through virtual consultations or schedule in-depth, face-to-face meetings to discuss your performance needs in detail.

 

Designed for accessibility and convenience, our platform ensures that top-level support is always within reach—whether you’re at home, on the road, or preparing for your next competition. Join us online and take the first step towards unlocking your potential, with expert support available anytime, anywhere.

Around the Clock, Ready for You

When...

When can you access support from Martel Performance? Anytime you need it. Our commitment to your success means that expert guidance is available 24/7 through our online platform. Whether you’re preparing for a big event, recovering after an intense session, or simply seeking advice to enhance your daily routine, we’re here whenever you need us.

 

With round-the-clock access to personalised guidance, you’re never alone on your performance journey. At Martel Performance, we’re dedicated to supporting you at every step, ensuring you have the resources and expertise required to perform at your best, day or night.

Empowering Every Step of Your Journey

Why...

Why choose Martel Performance? Because we believe every athlete deserves a holistic, science-backed approach to reach their peak. Our services go beyond standard training; we are dedicated to addressing all areas of performance—nutrition, recovery, and sleep—ensuring that you have the support needed to excel in every aspect of your sport.

At Martel Performance, we understand that success in athletics is about more than just talent. It requires resilience, tailored guidance, and a commitment to health and well-being. We are here to empower you with the tools, knowledge, and support needed to elevate your game and achieve lasting success. By choosing Martel Performance, you are choosing a partner that is as committed to your journey as you are.

Meet Our Experts

With the combination of culinary and sleep expertise, we here at Martel Performance are dedicated to helping you achieve your best athletic potential through tailored nutrition and sleep advice.

Educational Posts

Discover More
Youth Sports

Youth Athletes: Training Load, Recovery, and Injury Risk

Managing training load is a critical component of youth athlete development. While training is necessary for improvement, excessive or poorly managed load increases the risk of injury and limits long-term
Youth Athletes

Youth Athletes: Early Specialisation vs Long-Term Development

Youth athletes are often encouraged to specialise in a single sport at an early age. While this may appear to accelerate progress, early specialisation can have unintended consequences for both performance
Youth Athletes

Youth Athletes: Why Sleep Is the Most Important Performance Tool

Sleep is one of the most important factors influencing performance in youth athletes. Despite this, it is often the most overlooked. Adolescence is a period of significant physical, cognitive, and emotional
Sleep Schedule

Small Habits, Big Outcomes: Why Performance Is Built in Daily Details

Athletes often look for significant changes to improve performance. However, long-term progress is more commonly driven by small, consistent behaviours rather than isolated large interventions. Daily
field

Performance Is Built Between Sessions, Not During Them

Training is often seen as the primary driver of performance. While it provides the necessary stimulus, the actual process of improvement occurs outside of training sessions. Adaptation takes place during recovery
Football

You Can’t Out-Train Poor Recovery

Athletes often respond to poor performance by increasing training effort. While this may seem logical, it overlooks a fundamental principle: adaptation depends on recovery. Training provides the stimulus for improvement. Recovery allows the body to respond to that stimulus
Sleep

Decision-Making Under Fatigue: Why You Make Poor Choices When Tired

Athletes often associate fatigue with physical performance. However, fatigue also affects cognitive function, influencing decision-making, judgement, and behaviour. When the body is fatigued, the brain prioritises efficiency
Athletes

Consistency Over Intensity: Why Repeatable Behaviour Wins

Athletes are often drawn to high-intensity efforts, extreme sessions, and short bursts of motivation. While these can feel productive, long-term performance is built through consistency rather than isolated intensity
Running

Fatigue Is Not Always Fitness: Understanding Training Load and Recovery

Fatigue is often interpreted as a sign of productive training. While training does create fatigue, not all fatigue reflects positive adaptation. Performance improves when training stress is balanced with recovery
Football Pitch

Energy Availability: Why Under-Fuelling Limits Performance

Athletes often focus on training load as the primary driver of performance. However, adaptation to training is dependent on the availability of energy to support that work. When energy intake is insufficient relative
Hydration

Hydration and Performance: Why When You Drink Matters

Hydration is often discussed in terms of total intake across the day. While overall fluid consumption is important, performance is influenced not only by how much you drink, but also by when fluid is available
Food

Fuel Timing Across the Day: Supporting Training, Recovery, and Sleep

Athletes often focus on what they eat, but performance is equally influenced by when energy is available across the day. Fuel timing is not simply a nutritional detail. It is a performance variable that interacts with
Training

Training Timing and Performance: Does It Matter When You Train?

Athletes often look for the optimal time of day to train. While physiology does influence performance across the day, the answer is not as simple as identifying a single “best” time. Human performance follows
Sun

Morning Light and Performance: Why How You Start Your Day Matters

Athletes often focus on improving sleep by changing what they do at night. While this is important, sleep is strongly influenced by what happens earlier in the day - particularly in the morning. Light is the primary regulator
Athlete

You Don’t Need More Motivation. You Need Better Systems.

Most athletes already know what they need to do. They know sleep matters. They know nutrition matters. They know recovery matters. Yet performance remains inconsistent. This is not a knowledge problem
Sleep

The Pre-Sleep Window: Why the Last Hour of Your Day Matters

Many athletes focus on when they go to bed, assuming that sleep begins the moment they lie down. In reality, sleep is not an instant process. It requires a gradual transition from a state of high physiological
Bed

Sleep Consistency vs Sleep Quantity

Athletes are often told to “get more sleep”. And while sleep duration does matter, it doesn’t fully explain why recovery feels inconsistent or performance fluctuates from week to week. Sleep is regulated by rhythmic biological systems that respond best to predictability
Bed

Weekend Lie-Ins, Social Jet Lag, and Monday Fatigue

Many athletes sleep later on weekends to recover from busy weeks. While this feels intuitive, large shifts in sleep timing can disrupt the body’s circadian rhythm. This phenomenon is known as social jet lag
Bed

Screens, Light, and Circadian Delay: Why Sleep Gets Pushed Later

Many athletes struggle to fall asleep at night despite feeling physically tired. This is often attributed to stress, overthinking, or poor sleep habits. In reality, light exposure plays a central biological role
Bed

Sleep Duration vs Sleep Quality: Why 8 Hours Isn’t Enough

Athletes are often told they need eight hours of sleep. And while sleep duration does matter, it’s only one part of the recovery picture. Sleep is not a passive state. It is a structured biological process made up of
Bed

Late Training, Arousal, and Why Sleep Suffers

Many athletes train in the evening. For some, it’s the only realistic option around work, study, or family life. But it’s also common for late sessions to be followed by difficulty falling asleep, restless nights, or poor-quality sleep
Coffee

Caffeine, Coffee, and Sleep: What Athletes Need to Know

Caffeine is one of the most widely used performance aids in sport. Used well, it can improve alertness, lower perceived effort, and help lift training output. The issue isn’t caffeine itself
Food

Why When You Eat Matters For Athletic Performance

When it comes to nutrition, most athletes focus on what they eat. Food quality matters, of course, but it’s only part of the picture. When you eat plays a major role in how well that fuel is used, how effectively you recover
Calendar

Why Routines Beat Motivation

Ever felt like your training consistency relies purely on how motivated you feel? You wouldn’t be alone - many athletes think like this. When motivation is high, training feels easy. When it drops, habits start to slip and routines break down. This creates an unstable cycle.
Sleep

Why Being Tired Feels Like Losing Motivation

Many athletes go through phases where they feel unmotivated, flat, or disconnected from training. When that happens, the instinctive response is often self-blame. Discipline must be slipping. Desire must be fading.
Athletes

Discipline Beats Talent

Talent gets a lot of attention in sport, often presented as the defining factor in success. From a young age, athletes are labelled as “naturally gifted”, “fast”, or “talented”, while others are quietly written off. It’s a simple story, and an appealing one, but it’s also misleading.
Sleep

You Don’t Need Motivation to Start

A lot of athletes believe motivation is the starting point for progress. When it drops, the assumption is often that discipline is lacking, hunger has gone, or mental toughness isn’t where it should be. From a performance point of view, that way of thinking usually misses the mark.
Housing

How Housing Affects Young Players Financially

When we think about football academies, the focus is usually on potential - the next big talent, the rise through the ranks, the pathway to the Premier League. But for the teenagers inside these systems, life isn’t just about football. There’s education, welfare, and, surprisingly, tax.
Bed

Sleeping Better When the Temperature Drops

Well, the temperature’s changing, and it’s now a lot colder than it used to be. So how do we sleep well when the weather turns cold? The temptation is to turn up the heating and make the room as warm as possible. But once you get into bed, that often backfires, and you start to overheat.
Bedroom Lighting and Sleep

Bedroom Lighting and Sleep

Bedroom lighting often gets a lot of attention, but usually for the wrong reasons. Many people want bright, fancy lights to showcase their bedroom or make the space feel bigger. The popular choice these days is spotlights - often blue LED rather than soft white.
Women vs. Men Sleep Differences and Body Temperature in Professional Sport

Women vs. Men: Sleep Differences and Body Temperature in Professional Sport

In elite sport, every detail matters — recovery, nutrition, mindset, and sleep all play crucial roles in performance. Yet, one area that’s often overlooked, even at the highest level, is how a woman’s menstrual cycle influences sleep and body temperature.
Breaking the Taboo Around Male Fertility in Professional Sport

Breaking the Taboo Around Male Fertility in Professional Sport

In elite sport, athletes are constantly working to optimise every aspect of their performance – from nutrition and recovery to mindset and physical conditioning. But one area that often goes unspoken is male fertility.
Candy-Coated Consequences

Candy-Coated Consequences

There’s nothing wrong with treating yourself to the occasional sweet treat, but what happens when this infrequent reward becomes an unbreakable habit? What effect is it having on your performance, and how can we break this detrimental habit in order for you to be able to perform at full capacity?
Paye Tax Code

Paye Tax Code

Is your PAYE tax code correct and is sufficient tax being deducted from your salary?

This is often a source of confusion for footballers and an incorrect tax code leads to unexpected tax bills.
Sleep Trackers

Sleep Trackers: Helpful Tool or Hidden Stressor?

- Whether sleep trackers are helpful or harmful
- Why focusing only on activity can be misleading
- How over-reliance on tracking can cause anxiety
- The benefits of newer trackers for recovery
Your Sleep Season Broken Down

Game, Set, Nap: Your Sleep Season Starts Here

For most athletes, when they think of performance, they think of the field. But there is an often-neglected tool hiding in plain sight: sleep. Your sleep season provides the foundations for rebuilding, resetting and preparing your body to push even further tomorrow.
Understanding Sleep Why It Really Matters

Understanding Sleep: Does It Really Matter?

- Why understanding the value of sleep helps you stick to it
- How little time athletes actually spend competing vs recovering
- Why sleep is one of the biggest untapped performance tools
- A breakdown of where your real gains happen during the season
What Happens When It All Goes Wrong with Your Sleep

What Happens When It All Goes Wrong with Your Sleep?

- What happens when your sleep goes off track
- Common reasons sleep gets disrupted
- Why it matters when sleep quality drops
- How to get your sleep routine back on track
Martel Craving Calories

Craving Calories After Dark

We’ve all been there – it’s 9pm and we are feeling peckish after dinner. So, we head downstairs to grab a little snack, whether it be leftovers, a bag of crisps, or a sweet treat. But how does this affect our performance as athletes, and how can we manage our eating schedule to prevent spontaneous snacking after dark?
Martel Gut Microbiome

Gut Microbiome: The Performance Edge

Your gut does more than just digest food—it plays a powerful role in your performance, recovery, and overall health. In this article, we break down what the gut microbiome is, how to keep it in good shape, and why that matters for athletes like you.
Screens Vs. Sleep

Screens vs. Sleep: What You Need to Know

- Common questions about using electronics in the bedroom
- Why electronic devices can disrupt sleep quality
- The psychological attachment many people have to their devices
- The importance of creating a tech-free sleep environment
Timer x2

The Power of Nutrient Timing for Elite Athletes

For elite athletes, nutrient timing is a critical component of performance and recovery. This piece outlines the physiological and performance-based reasons why eating at the right times matters. Properly timed meals enhance energy availability.
Bedroom Lighting

Better Sleep for Athletes Starts with Better Lighting

Low level lighting to calm the room at night to aid ‘switching off’​. Try red or orange side lighting rather than bright white bedside lights​. Use a dim light if night lighting is needed to avoid awakening.​ ​Avoid bathroom lighting where possible​ – Use low level lighting if possible in time before bed​
Martel Sleep Impact

Men vs. Women: The Sleep Impact of the Female Hormone Cycle

- The differences between male and female sleep patterns
- How the female hormone cycle affects sleep throughout the month
- The impact of temperature changes linked to hormonal shifts
- Practical tips to adjust your sleep environment and routine accordingly
Dairy Free

Why Elite Athletes Are Going Dairy-Free: Performance-Boosting Benefits

Elite athletes are increasingly turning to dairy-free diets to gain a competitive edge. This article explores how removing dairy may reduce inflammation, improve digestion, and enhance recovery—key factors in high performance. With insights from science and sport, it highlights why dairy-free living could be a smart move for those aiming to train harder, recover faster, and perform at their peak.
nap

Are Evening Naps Beneficial?

You are allowed to nap but ensure it is done properly​. Don’t nap for longer 30 minutes​. Avoid naps later in the day​. A Good way to increase total sleep time if used properly​
Finance

Struggling To Sleep Without Financial Clarity?

Due to the competitive nature of professional sports, those at the elite level are seeking ways to improve their performance and often forego their mental wellbeing in pursuit of winning.

We provide straightforward, discreet and a diligent service so that finance and money can be managed efficiently, leaving more time to focus on mental health and achieve greater heights.
Breakfast

Don’t Skip Breakfast

Breakfast plays a vital role in the performance and well-being of elite athletes. As the first opportunity to refuel after overnight fasting, a healthy breakfast enhances energy levels, supports muscle recovery, stabilizes blood sugar, and improves cognitive function. It also contributes to a healthy metabolism, body composition, and immune system. Skipping this critical meal can impair both physical and mental performance, making breakfast an essential component of an elite athlete's daily routine.
Improving sleep

Improving Sleep for Female Footballers During the Menstrual Cycle

Sleep is crucial for athletic performance, recovery, and health. Female footballers face unique challenges due to menstrual cycle changes and varying match schedules, which affect sleep patterns. This article explores strategies to optimise sleep across different menstrual phases while adapting to match timings for improved performance and well-being.
Importance of Turmeric

Importance of Turmeric

Turmeric, a yellow spice from the Curcuma longa plant, is valued for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Its active ingredient, curcumin, provides key health benefits. Widely used in traditional medicine, turmeric supports athletes by enhancing performance and recovery, making it a powerful natural aid in sports and fitness.
Electronics

Electronics, How Do They Affect Sleep Performance?

Minimise time spent in the bedroom when not sleeping. Avoid screens at least 30 minutes before bedtime, as they can delay sleep onset. Charge your phone outside the bedroom and refrain from using it as an alarm clock. Limit TV distractions—record shows to watch later rather than viewing them live.
Hydration

Importance Of Hydration

Hydration is essential for elite athletes as it supports nearly all bodily functions, helps maintain energy, boosts physical and mental performance, and aids recovery. Despite its critical role, it is often underestimated or overlooked.
Bedroom Management

Bedroom Management

Maintain a cool bedroom for better sleep regulation. Keep the room quiet and free from distractions, such as technology. Avoid eating or drinking in bed. Use a dimly lit alarm clock instead of a phone to minimise disruptions.