#More2Me has been designed to develop a "more-rounded" identity for athletes, which reflects them as a person as well as an athlete.

Double Olympic skeleton champion Lizzie Yarnold and five-time Paralympic gold medallist Hannah Cockroft are two athletes to have also given their backing to the idea.

"Being a dedicated, fully focused elite athlete is hugely rewarding but can also be all-consuming," Davies said.

"I hope this new initiative can help sportspeople use their talents so they can foster other interests too."

EIS head of performance lifestyle Joanna Harrison said many athletes feel a "huge sense of loss" at the end of their careers, having often failed to plan for what to do next.

"This often reflects not only a lack of planning for retirement but also a loss of identity as their development as a person had been subsumed by their athletic endeavours and once they are no longer competing they can understandably often lack a sense of self and purpose," she said.

"#More2Me aims to address this by encouraging athletes to think about these issues earlier in their careers by developing a more rounded identity and recognising that their future can be just as fulfilling as their competitive days."

Sochi 2014 and Pyeongchang 2018 skeleton champion Yarnold said she would recommend "having interests outside of sport" to any athlete.

"I never thought of myself as just an athlete and during my career I always aimed to strike a balance between being an athlete and having interests outside of sport," she said.

"I felt that having a life outside of sport and doing things like being involved in education or pursuing hobbies helped me to relax into being an athlete and had a positive impact on my performance.

"It is an approach I would recommend to any young athlete that has aspirations to reach the top and I can honestly say, hand on heart, that doing things like education and having things in my life other than just training and competing were all major reasons why I was successful as an athlete and achieved the things I did."

Wheelchair racer Cockroft added that while sport "always comes first", it is important to have a life outside of training.

The imitative will see the EIS performance lifestyle team deliver personalised support services to athletes from more than 30 UK Sport funded world class performance programmes.

Former gymnast Kristian Thomas claims he has already benefited from their help.

"Early in my career I had tunnel vision and was only interested in results, getting a certain score or of being selected for certain competitions," he said. 

"However about two years out from Rio [2016 Olympics] it began to dawn on me that I needed to start thinking about what I was going to do after the Games as I knew it would be my last one.

"Working with our EIS performance lifestyle advisor helped me to think about what I am good at, what I might be interested in and what I need to do to pursue those interests.

"It meant that by the time of Rio I had a plan in place and six weeks after competing at the Games I started at university."

The EIS was established in 2002 and since its inception has worked with sports leading up to and during Olympic and Paralympic Games, Commonwealth Games and many National, European and world events in sport.