How Tiny 1% Improvements led British Cycling Team To Olympic Gold
Marginal gains helped them to achieve the impossible
When Sir Dave Brailsford became head of British Cycling in 2003, the team had almost no record of success. The performance of the British team was so mediocre that they are only able to win won one Olympic medal since 1908 and the worst in the biggest cycling event Tour de France where no British cyclists had ever won the event in the last 110 years.
You can understand the severity of their bad reputation as one of the top bike manufacturers refused to sell bikes to the brits team, knowing it might hurt their sales if other groups knew that the British squad uses their bicycles.
When the British cycling association made Dave Brailsford the performance director of the cycling team in 2003, the British cycling association had hired Dave to transform the British cycling team. As a professional cyclist and MBA, dave was a fan of the strategy called “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which meant searching for a small margin of improvement in everything you do.
The whole process comes like this if you could think of what goes into riding a bike and improving everything by 1 percent. Aggregation of all the things is a significant improvement in total, and it will lead to a remarkable increase in performance.
When he first joined the team, the gold is a very long shot, but his experience in kaizen and process improvement techniques. He suggested the team should think small, not significant, and adopt a philosophy of continuous improvement through marginal gains. He led the team to focus on a system, not on perfection, and let the marginal improvements do the work.
Process for identifying the opportunities
Dave and all the team coaches started making minor adjustments to all things that go into professional cycling. Such as:
- They were redesigning bike seats to make them more comfortable.
- Used new electric heated over shorts to maintain optimum muscle temperature for maximum output.
- They used biofeedback sensors to monitor how each athlete responded and performed in each workout.
- Clothes tested in the wind tunnel to find lighter, more aerodynamic racing suits.
They didn’t even stop there; they hired a surgeon who taught them how to wash their hands properly to avoid the chances of getting cold. They Began testing different massaged gels to find out which gel provides the fastest muscle recovery. They tried a few mattresses and pillows, determining which sleep posture offers athletes the best sleep. They kept doing these sorts of countless improvements.
The results
In 2008, after five years, the British cycling team won 60 percent of the gold medals available in the track cycling event in the Beijing Olympics. After four years in London Olympics, the British team set seven world records and nine Olympics records.
In the same year, British cyclist Bradley Wiggins become the first British cyclist to win the tour de France. After that, another cyclist from Britain in 2013 won the tour de France. The marginal improvements don't stop here. Brit cyclist went on a winning spree for continuous years in 2015, 2016, and 2017. The British team won five out of six tour de France victories in the last six years.
British cyclists' astounding performance from 2007–2017 won 66 Olympic and Paralympic medals, 178 championships, and five tours de France victories.
So What Happened
How come a team who never won in nearly the last 100 years in tour de France won five out of six? How come those average athletes become world champions? How that minor improvements in sleeping, washing hands, resulted in so many remarkable results? Why do these minor improvements lead to these noteworthy improvements, and how can you replicate this approaching our work and life?
Compound effects of marginal gains
Too often, we rely upon big moments to happen for massive success, either losing weight, start a business, writing a book, or even winning a medal in Olympics. We put so much hope on that earth-shattering movement of self-improvement to come that solves all our life problems and the moment never came. What matters is how good your system is, which leads you to minor improvements daily.
How tiny improvements make a big difference
If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
A slight 1 percent improvement is barely noticeable; you don't even feel like something is happening. But in the long run, these tiny minor improvements will far exceed the results.
When you began 1% better or worst, it won't affect you much today, but in the long run, the aggregation effect of better or worse widens your success gap.
Most people love to set goals. Every athlete in the Olympics has the same purpose; win an Olympic medal. Every student wants to do well in the exams. If successful people and unsuccessful have the same goals, then the goal is not the deciding factor between winners and losers. The goal is always the same for both. Only a few won because of their system of slight continuous improvement that gives them different outcomes.
Slight improvement doesn't matter much today. Saving ten bucks won't make you a millionaire. Working out for straight three days won’t make you fit. If you eat pizza today, it won't make you fat today. If you put your assignment on hold, you can finish it tomorrow. But accumulating these habits day by day for months, years will make a huge difference.
Where you are right now won't matter much as long you know where you are heading. All the achievements in your life are measures of your habits; your net worth is the result of saving habits; your health is the result of eating habits; your skills are the results of your learning habits. You get what you repeat every day.
Ref:
- core.ac.uk/download/pdf/52397684.pdf
- jamesclear.com
- hbr.org
