Mental Coaching: The Sum of Marginal Gains

Continuous improvement is key in sports mental coaching. It's essential to achieving performance optimization. The history of the British Cycling Federation teaches us a valuable lesson in this regard.

The British Cycling Federation had no distinguished history. No notable performances at the Olympics, for example, and no victories in the world's most important cycling competition: the Tour de France.

In 2003 the Federation hired Dave Brailsford as technical director of the cycling team, his aim was simply to “change things”.

Dave Brailsford was convinced of one thing: big improvements are the result of many smaller improvements . His strategy, as he himself defined it, is called Sum of Marginal Gains , and it consists of this: you take the general area you want to improve, break it down into all the elements, and work to improve each of these elements (even if only by 1%). Then, after a certain period of time, when you add up the small improvements, you will notice the significant overall improvement.

The turning point

Dave Brailsford broke down the generic term "riding a bicycle" into a myriad of components. He implemented countless small, seemingly insignificant changes. For example, he redesigned bicycle saddles to be more comfortable. He had athletes wear heated shorts to maintain a constant muscle temperature. He hired an expert surgeon who taught athletes the proper way to wash their hands to minimize the risk of catching the flu. He replaced mattresses and pillows to improve cyclists' sleep. He painted the interiors of the vans in which the bicycles were transported white, so that any dust that could enter the various mechanisms and ultimately compromise the bikes' performance would be immediately visible.

There were hundreds of these small changes that led to an impressive overall improvement . Within five years of Dave Brailsford's arrival, the British team had won 60% of the gold medals up for grabs in cycling at the 2008 Beijing Olympics (they had never won a gold medal before). At the 2012 London Olympics, they did even better, sweeping the medals and breaking records , British cyclists won the Tour de France five times (again, no British athlete had ever achieved this).

How could this have happened? How was it possible to so dramatically transform the situation of a sports team in just five years? Much of the credit undoubtedly goes to Dave Brailsford's strategy, which, as we've seen, involves many small improvements that, when added together, lead to a major improvement.

Mental Coaching in Practice: The Marginal Gains Sum Strategy

This strategy has undoubtedly brought extraordinary results to the British cycling team. In sports, it can be applied to any discipline. One of the things that is increasingly happening is that mental aspects are considered a fundamental component to be constantly improved . This is why Mental Coaching is increasingly popular in sports: improving your mental attitude by even just 1% allows every other area to reap great benefits.

You too can adopt this strategy to improve any area of ​​your life:

• choose a context that is particularly close to your heart
• take a pen and paper
• write a list of all the things that make up the context you have chosen (write at least 20)
• Take all the elements and for each of them ask yourself this question: what could I do to improve this thing even by just 1%?
• build your action plan
• ACT! 😉

You may not be able to find a practical action for every factor on your list, but I'm sure you'll find plenty of things you can do right now to achieve small, immediate results. With a little patience and perseverance, you'll see significant improvements in your chosen context.

Click here to learn more about Sports Mental Coaching .