Marginal gains.........and massive potential for progress in endurance sport

Do you spend all of your time focusing on the bigger picture, your ultimate goal, the finish line? I encourage you to stop for a moment and think about the little things. Here's how they can make a really big difference to training, performance and sporting achievements.

What do you know about "marginal gains"? It's a concept I encourage my clients and athletes to think about a lot, whether their goals is a marathon or Ironman triathlon, or a much smaller goal.

Whilst many of us think that it's the massive decisions, the major choices and the big pledges which mean the most, it's actually the little things which make the biggest difference. 

What's more significant to your sports performance: the one huge training session you do every four weeks? Or the fact that you go to bed a little earlier than your peers so you can get up in the morning and train?

What matters more to your nutrition: the big blow-out you had for your spouse's birthday dinner, or the choice you make to pack your own lunch every single day for work?

See what I mean? Yes, those massive decisions and huge actions you make will certainly push you forward, and we can't have goals without big decisions. But, once the goal is set, I'd suggest that it's actually the small actions we make every hour, every week and every day which lead to success. It's about turning success into a habit.

You may have heard about Dave Brailsford's approach to improve the British Cycling team's habits by just 1%. He explained this aggregation of marginal gains as paying attention to "the 1% margin for improvement in everything you do.”

How could we use this approach to help us with our own sports performance? Start by looking at the things you do every day in and day out. The route you take to drive to training club, the time you go to bed, the amount of water you drink or the amount of time you spend on social media. Can you improve those daily habits by just 1%? Don't do too many at once. Just one would do. If you improve one habit a week by a small amount, you'll have 52 new, improved habits in a year. All of them will save you time, make you more efficient, boost your recovery and help training, nutrition, health and wellness.

And the best bit about paying attention to marginal gains? It barely seems significant at the time. Certainly it's no great effort and won't have major knock-on effects in relationships or at work. But it adds up over time. Soon, you'll be able to look back and see how all those 1%s have made a massive difference to your success.