Patricio Fernández Quintana
Registered Clinical & Sport Psychologist (No. 36007)
I'm Patricio, a sport and clinical psychologist, endurance athlete, and founder of h.lab.
For more than a decade I've explored how athletes train, recover, and adapt under stress, working at the intersection of sport psychology, mental health, recovery science, and psychophysiology.
This began as something personal. A long-term lumbar injury changed not just how I trained, but how I understood effort, pain, recovery, and adaptation. It pushed me toward the questions I still work on today: how physiology, psychology, and environment shape an athlete over time.
Working with athletes and performance environments across South America, Africa, and Europe made one thing clear. Most challenges athletes face don't live within a single discipline. Training, recovery, physiology, emotions, behaviour, and life circumstances are inseparable. Lasting performance depends on understanding how they interact.
h.lab grew out of that: a space to approach performance, recovery, and long-term development as one system rather than a stack of separate services.
Let's explore the frontiers of resilience together.
Sport Psychologist & Performance Consultant
- Registered Clinical & Sport Psychologist (No. 36007)
- MSc in Sport Psychology, Complex Systems & Sport Performance
- Advanced training in Psychophysiology and Affective Neuroscience
- Experience across South America, Africa & Europe
- Olympic & Paralympic pathway experience
- Consultations available in English, Spanish & Portuguese
Support for the athlete
Psychological support for athletes seeking to improve performance, navigate challenges, strengthen self-regulation,
and sustain long-term development. Depending on the athlete and context, work may focus on any of the following areas:
Self and body awareness
Confidence and self-belief
Attention and decision-making
Imagery and visualization
Emotional and arousal regulation
Motivation and goal-setting
Competition preparation
Communication and team work
Performance
skills
Support during injury rehabilitation
Fear of re-injury
Concussion and return-to-sport protocols
Confidence rebuilding
Recovery from overtraining
Return
to performance
Sport-specific mental health screening (IOC SMHAT-1)
Anxiety and stress
Depression and low mood
Sleep disorders
Disordered eating
Substance use and behavioural addictions
Burnout and emotional exhaustion
Identity, career transitions and retirement
Mental
health
Allostatic load assessment (overtraining prevention)
Breathing and respiratory efficiency
Nervous-system regulation (HRV biofeedback)
Sleep and circadian regulation
Fueling and hydration habits (RED-S prevention)
Individualized heat, altitude and recovery protocols
Psychophysiology
and recovery
Support for developing athletes, coaches & teams
Supporting healthy development, effective leadership, and resilient performance environments.
Long-term athlete development
Identity formation
Balancing sport and education
Parent and coach support
Transition to higher performance environments
Youth athlete pathway
Leadership and communication
Team culture
Psychological safety
Coach wellbeing
Athlete-coach relationships
Coach and team support