A caller once rang Dr Claire-Marie Roberts, then performance director at Coventry City, and asked whether she knew how much of the atmosphere was oxygen.
She did. It’s 21 per cent, which she recognised as GCSE chemistry.
The product he was selling was oxygen in a can.
She told the story in an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, and it made me laugh. It’s also a neat illustration of something I recognise from twenty years working in professional sport.
Roberts spent nine years at the Premier League and two as performance director at Coventry City before joining McLaren this summer. At Coventry she was receiving up to fifty LinkedIn messages a week offering devices, supplements and technologies that promised remarkable results.
Her concern is the gap between what the science supports and what clubs actually do. Clubs can be persuaded by good marketing, while players who are desperate for an edge are understandably attracted to anything that might give them one.
Cryotherapy chambers are one of her examples. They are commonplace in elite sport, despite what Roberts describes as limited evidence for their use, and she points to research suggesting they may even blunt some of the muscular adaptation training is intended to produce.
Sleep and nutrition, she points out, remain the most important tools for recovery.
Her point isn’t that innovation is a bad thing. Elite sport has benefited enormously from advances in sports science, medicine, technology and data. Her point is that the pursuit of an advantage can become more seductive than doing the basics exceptionally well.
Where the one per cent came from
The phrase “marginal gains” is most closely associated with Sir Dave Brailsford and British Cycling.
The idea was that if you broke performance down into its component parts and improved lots of those things by around one per cent, the combined gains could become significant.
The stories that travelled were the memorable ones: riders taking their own pillows to hotels so they slept better, and being taught to wash their hands thoroughly so they didn’t pick up illness.
Those stories are true, and the thinking behind them was sound.
But they weren’t happening in isolation.
They belonged to a much larger performance programme built around training, coaching, equipment, talent identification, planning and standards.
Somehow, as the idea travelled beyond cycling, the colourful details became the story.
We kept the pillows and forgot the programme.
The unremarkable 80 per cent
After twenty years working in professional sport, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about high performance is that the people at the very top know a secret that everybody else doesn’t.
Mostly, they don’t.
They know an enormous amount, of course. The expertise surrounding an elite athlete can be extraordinary, from strength and conditioning, nutrition and analysis to psychology, medicine and recovery, with coaches who have spent entire careers understanding the smallest details of their sport.
Underneath all of that sophistication are some remarkably unremarkable things: preparation, repetition and recovery, clear standards, doing what you said you would do, reviewing what happened and then doing it again.
None of it makes a particularly sexy Instagram reel.
Perhaps that’s why the one per cent has travelled so well outside sport. We have become fascinated by the routines of successful people: what time they wake up, what they eat, which supplements they take, whether they meditate, which productivity system they use, and whether they plunge themselves into freezing water before breakfast.
We look at someone performing at an extraordinary level and ask what they’re doing that we’re not.
It’s a reasonable question. I’m just not convinced it’s usually the right one.
Knowing isn’t the problem
We usually already know quite a lot about what would make us better at the thing we’re trying to do.
We know the work that needs doing and the conversation we’re avoiding. We know whether we’re well prepared, which habits help us perform and which don’t, and what we said mattered to us.
The problem is rarely that nobody has told us about the revolutionary supplement.
It’s that knowing and consistently doing are two completely different things, and elite sport understands that extremely well.
Elite sport doesn’t leave consistency to motivation. There are training schedules, standards, reviews, analysis, feedback and accountability, a whole infrastructure built around performance.
Nobody expects an athlete to turn up and simply feel like doing the work.
And yet in the rest of our lives, we start a business, take on a difficult project, try to change something about ourselves or decide we want to achieve something ambitious, and somehow expect ourselves to produce the same consistency with a goal in a notebook and a vague intention to “be more disciplined.”
How to check your 80 per cent
Before you add anything new, work through this audit.
1. Write down what good looks like.
Make it specific enough that you’d know by Friday whether you’d done it. In elite sport, “get better” isn’t enough of a performance target on its own. Training has to translate that ambition into something specific enough to work towards.
2. List the behaviours that produce it.
Keep it to three to five things you would do in a normal week if you were serious about the goal. They’ll usually be obvious, and that’s the point.
3. Score yourself honestly for the last fortnight.
For each behaviour, count how often you actually did it. Elite environments review constantly. The point isn’t to produce a flattering score; it’s to establish what’s actually happening.
4. Close the gap before you add anything.
If you’re doing the basics half the time, a new app or supplement won’t fix that. Better structure might: a fixed slot in the diary, a weekly review, someone who will ask whether you did what you said you would.
5. Only then go looking for the one per cent.
When the one per cent does matter
None of this means the one per cent doesn’t matter.
At the very top of sport it can matter enormously. When two athletes are separated by hundredths of a second, and both have spent years doing the fundamentals exceptionally well, a legitimate marginal gain can be the difference between first and fourth.
That’s the part we seem to have missed when we borrowed the idea from elite sport.
The marginal gain comes after you’ve earned the margin.
You don’t optimise your way around inconsistent execution.
So the next time you’re tempted by another system, hack, supplement, app, morning routine or piece of advice promising to unlock another level of performance, ask yourself something first.
What do I already know works, and am I actually doing it consistently?
The thing standing between you and better performance may well be one per cent.
But I’d check the other 80 first.
PS. This is exactly why I created The Performance System. Over five weeks, we’ll work out what you’re working towards, establish the standards and actions that will get you there, and build a review process so you can see what’s working, what isn’t and what needs to change. Every week, you also get direct feedback from me on your progress.
If you don’t need another one per cent, but you do need a better structure for the other 80, you can join The Performance System here.