Improve your Life with ‘Marginal Gains'

Life lesson from a Tour de France Winning Team..

Weight loss, Time Management, Performance at Work, Investment Strategies…This strategy can be applied to achieving your goals in any aspect of life. The great thing about this technique is, it’s completely personal, and breaks improvement down to small ‘bite size’ chunks.

Marginal Gain’s I hear you ask?! What are they?

I came across this term for the first time whilst watching a documentary about Team Sky Cycling Team, following them for a whole year in the lead up to winning their first Tour de France. This concept can be fully integrated to improve your life, in a way you may never have approached self improvement before…

The Concept

Imagine your a coach and your job is to improve the performance of one of the top athletes in the world. Improving his/her form by 10% would feel like an insurmountable task, in a sport where 1% makes all the difference. But, what if you tried to improve every aspect of that athlete’s lives by 1%. When you aggregate all these ‘Marginal Gains’ together, suddenly that 10% improvement feels possible..

The term ‘Look after the Pennies, and the Pounds will look after themselves’ comes to mind. Essentially, improving ‘lots’ of aspects of you life by a little, add’s up to a lot.

It’s all about the details. Team Sky go to an astonishing level of detail to get their Cyclist in the best possible shape for any given race..Some examples are;

1. They develop the equipment their cyclists use direct with the manufacture (The Bike, The Helmet, The Clothing,….using wind tunnels and top scientists to get the highest power, and most aerodynamic package on the road). This allows them to eek out some marginal gains on performance. They will spend £millions to get a small edge over their competition.
2. They use the same mattress/pillow during training, at home and during multi stage races. Sleep is where recovery happens, so a good night sleep can make a big difference.
3. They spent £1m+ on a bus, so their athlete can travel to and from races in comfort..
4. …
5. …
6. …

I could go on, in reality this list is probably thousands of points long. Now to bring this method around to the real world.

Weight Loss

Everyone know that to lose weight you need to do 3 things

1. Eat Healthy
2. Eat Less
3. Exercise

The problem with approaching weight loss through changing these 3 life style aspect is, it’s very overwhelming and does’t take into consideration everything else that is going on with your life. Your asking yourself to improve these 3 things, in some cases, by 100%, with no help as to how to live your life at the same time…

If you understand that, problems can be caused by doing lots of little things wrong, and changing these little things by 1% could be the difference between success and failure, it feels far more achievable from the outstep.

1. Eat Healthy: Look at your typical daily diet. Rather than changing your diet completely, try swapping out ingredients for a healthier option. For instance, if you have Porridge with milk and sugar for breakfast… Reduce the oats portion, Change the milk for unsweetened almond milk, reduce the sugar, add fruit…Still taste good, still essentially the same breakfast…
2. Eat Less: Look to reduce every meal and snack by a little bit, not cut out meals all together. A 10% reduction in portion size adds up over the coarse of the day, but it’s only a bite or 2 less with each meal
3. Exercise: Look for dead time in the day to exercise (maybe you have 3x15mins…), don’t turn your life upside down to fit it in. This increases you chances of sticking with the program. Also try things like, walk fast wherever your going, sit on a swiss ball at work…

Time Management

Let’s say you would like to find more time to spend with the family in the evening, but you’ve got so much stuff to do, the list seems endless.

Look at each daily task which eats into time with your family, and think about whether there would be a way of doing that task quicker, or whether there is a way of doing multiple tasks at the same time. If your cooking dinner, pick a dish that is quick, but can be left on the stove while you…clean up, do the dishes, put the washing on, get changed, get the kids ready for bed…Pre cut vegetable could save you 5mins, picking a dish that can be left alone to cook for 10mins, gives you 10mins to get other things sorted. That’s 15mins already…

Is it better to stay at work for another 30mins, so you don’t have to work at home for an hour?...

This can be applied to any aspect of your life where you want change, and you have a goal..

In Summary..

It would be interesting to hear others thoughts on this. Below is a link to the documentary if your interested (episode 2 especially). I personally think this is a great way to approach self improvement, whatever you deem that be, or want it to be…