A world champion’s body of evidence: Nicola Olyslagers

With her hands gripping a chin-up bar that’s drilled into one of the New South Wales Institute of Sport’s (NSWIS) squat racks while her feet are wedged against the top of an adjustable weightlifting bench, world champion high jumper Nicola Olyslagers starts doing an exercise that might even confound a Cirque de Soleil contortionist.

Olyslagers somehow defies physics to not only seamlessly hinge her hips from what appears to be a precarious position, but she also raises, then lowers, one leg at a time with slow and deliberate precision. Once finished she explains how her mind processes even the most minute of movements, including the feel of the muscles she’s strengthening.

World champion high jumper Nicola Olyslagers pursuing excellence in the NSWIS gym: Photo: Rachel Tingey, NSWIS

The 2025 World Athletics Field Athlete of the Year is conscious it may look, well, strange to the uninformed eye. She even supposes some of her fellow athletes might not ‘get’ it. However, Olyslagers’s record – world Indoor and outdoor champion, two-times Olympic silver medallist, Diamond League champion, Australian high jump record holder after leaping 2.04m – proves this particular exercise, and the other ‘different’ things she does, has been a recipe for success.

Olyslagers will defend one of her crowns when she competes at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Poland from March 20-22 alongside fellow NSWIS scholarships holders including high jumper Eleanor Patterson, the 2022 world champion and an Olympic bronze medallist, Jessica Hull, the Paris Olympics 1500m silver medallist , and Hayley Kitching who has been setting meet records in the USA as a member of Penn State’s track team.

As she prepares to fly out of Australia, Olyslagers credits her personal strength and conditioning coach, Brisbane-based Nicolai Morris (pictured above) for tailoring programs that galvanise any imbalances or weaknesses Olyslagers’s pit crew –  physiotherapist Brett Doring and exercise physiologist/pilates instructor Leigh-Anne McBride – identify.

“I’ve been doing Nicolai’s programs for close to 10 years,” said Olyslagers of Morris, who is also an accredited gymnastics coach. “Having this relationship where I can trust her no matter how crazy the program looks; we know it’s going to bring the edge of learning more about myself through body awareness.

“The more challenging the exercise, the more I learn my weaknesses. When I can identify new weaknesses, that actually helps me then find the next area to work on [to gain as a high jumper] extra centimetres. I actually get excited every time I find them because the longer you do training, the harder it is to dig down and find where those areas [that need improving] are.”

Olyslagers appeared surprised when asked why an elite athlete would be ‘excited’ about finding a deficiency that will require time and effort to rectify.

“It’s exciting because if I was ‘perfect’ in everything, then maybe 2.04m would be the absolute maximum I could jump,” she explained. “But because there’s still so much more to work on – and the world record gets closer and closer – it just gets more exciting to think: ‘Oh, actually if we nail this, then it’s that extra centimetre’ [towards the women’s world record of 2.10m].

“It also allows me to have more consistency in the other sessions of my training week because I can be doing the same things but know that because I have programs like this that is so unique provides so much new stimulus it means I’m never going to get stuck in the same routine. It will always keep improving.”

Olyslagers, whose every decision is geared towards celebrating success at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, said her results also reflect the importance of not only her long-term coach Matt Horsnell’s guidance, but the collective efforts of Morris, Doring and McBride in helping with the ‘gold mining’ that’s needed for her to better understand her body’s mechanics.

“[My body awareness] has improved so much I honestly don’t know how I jumped 1.90m  with the amount of weaknesses I had, but I didn’t realise that until I’ve been improving,” she said. “Nicolai noted that my whole chain reaction of movements was always driven by my knee so, all of the strength you’d get throughout your hips, – which is so important as a high jumper – wasn’t that strong. I’d be using, I would say, the wrong muscles to activate the movements.

“When you do that; you can get away with it especially as a high jumper. Being tall I could get away with a lot, but since the first world championships [I competed in] through to the latest [Tokyo], I could say I’m actually now using all the muscles in the right way and more and more and I’m able to get more out of the same movements because I’ve been a student of the sport – and my body.”

Olyslagers, who is renowned for jotting down her thoughts and observations in between jumps at competitions as well as for her devotion to the teachings of Jesus Christ, said there are obvious advantages that come from an athlete understanding their body. One being that it allows them to constantly push boundaries.

“[That understanding] is exciting because when you see challenges or things that start to get harder in training. You can find out where your new limit is because I have to always rethink where I set my limits,” said Olyslagers.

“If I box myself into [the mindset:] ‘this is the limits, this is always the way the boundaries are going to be with, let’s say high jump or my sprints’ well then, I can disregard all of those training sessions and think ‘there’s no more improvement left.’

“But when you have more control over your body you have a fresh perspective. You go back into the same training sessions you’ve done for 20-years and all of a sudden you can do something that you couldn’t do before and, as an elite athlete, I think one of the challenges is knowing how to push yourself into a new realm of training but not burn yourself out.

 “So, when you have more control over your body it takes a lot of self-control to not just put 100 percent effort in and then push yourself to that injury point because you need to then think, ‘how am I going to use all of these new skills for the future’ . . . ‘how am I going to use this so it will help me jump higher’.

“That’s where goalsetting and the planning comes into it. My team keeps me really accountable of ‘this is what we’re aiming for this year, and this is an important training session.’ And if I can keep that in mind it gives me the wisdom to know ‘OK, I can push it,’ or think ‘today I can’t push it as much, but I’ll nail the technique more so than the speed of it.”

And that’s the reason the world high jump champion is in the NSWIS gymnasium gripping a chin-up bar that’s drilled into a squat rack and doing an exercise that would surprise a Cirque de Soliel contortionist . . .

Daniel Lane, NSWIS

Photos: Rachel Tingey, NSWIS