Science Has Finally Figured Out How Elite Athletes Best Each Other. Pay Attention.

In my new book Faster, Higher, Stronger, I examine the things that elite athletes, their coaches, and the scientists who work with them do to become great, and explore the ways that those techniques can be applied to more normal athletic pursuits. One of the most intriguing things that I discovered is that there are ways that the high-performance sports world approaches problems—a worldview—that has broad relevance far beyond the glare of the Olympic games or professional leagues.

Those philosophies and common threads that run through the pursuit of athletic greatness aren’t just ways to win championships. They’re also ways to optimize other parts of our lives. From specific ways to workout more intelligently to a philosophy that can drive decision-making in your business, these are some of the key lessons that all of us can learn from the very best athletes and coaches in the world.

Lots of Little Things Become Big Changes

The women’s 100 meter final at the 2007 World Championships might have been the closest race ever held. The photo finish to resolve the winner of the race took quite some time—Veronica Campbell and Lauryn Williams were both times in 11.01 seconds, but after looking and looking at the photo, officials decided that Campbell barely nudged out Williams at the line, a nearly imperceptible difference even in the tool that was designed to make those differences apparent. They were insanely close, but to some extent, it’s even more remarkable how close everyone else was as well.

The bronze medalist, Carmelita Jeter, finished in 11.02, just a hundredth behind. The next two runners, Torri Edwards and Kim Gevaert, finished with identical times of 11.05. The top five athletes in the race all finished within four hundredths of a second of one another—watching the video, it’s impossible to tell who wins or loses. No wonder the officials had such a hard time parsing the photo of the finish. They’re all basically on top of one another.

It's a good reminder that at the elite level there is so very little that separates the person who gets the glory from the one who wonders about what might have been. But more compelling—and more relevant to most of us—is how elites take those small margins and stack them on top of one another to realize big improvement. Dave Brailsford, who helped British Cycling become a world power, calls this "the aggregation of marginal gains."

It’s like the old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Life is about elephant eating for elite athletes. Even if you’re someone who can qualify for an Olympic final, making up those final bits of time can be overwhelming unless you break it down into smaller increments of progress.

John Fowlie is a swim coach at the AIS, where he’s helped guide swimmers into Olympic and World gold medals. He actually grew up at the AIS, since his father was a coach there before him, so he’s been immersed in the high-performance culture there for a majority of his life.

Fowlie told me about the sort of timeline you need to have to develop a champion. “It’s a long-term development,” he says. “You’re looking over the course of four to eight years, and multiple Olympics, as you start to construct an athlete’s career. Let’s say you're within a second of a gold medal. That’s a huge amount of time to cut right away, but what if you can get just a tiny bit faster every day? Less than a hundredth of a second, but each day, for two years.”

Improvement accrues like interest. Each day might seem small; each facet might seem like a tiny factor. But add them all up, and you’ve made a real difference. It’s turned British Cycling into one of the most dominant teams in any sport in the world, and it can work for each of us as well.

N=1

In a scientific paper, N is an shorthand for the number of participants, or the sample size. There’s a lively debate in science about how statistics are used, and how big a sample size needs to be and how significant the variations between groups need to be to truly demonstrate an effect in a study. But generally, more subjects—a bigger N—is better. The larger the group of people you try something with, the more authoritative you can be with your conclusions.

But when it comes to so many things in the athletic world, we are resolutely individual. I’d argue that in some ways, N=1 whenever we’re looking at most things in sports and performance. From the extent that we benefit from exercise to how we process visual information when we look at a sports field, from the effectiveness of caffeine to our sleep habits—we’re all unique. There are responders and non-responders across almost every possible intervention, and what works for me very likely won’t work in the same way for you.

So while there are things that seem to work for a great majority of athletes, our individualized responses are different, the result of the unique genome we carry and the environment we operate in. So, if you run and run and don’t see your speed increase, perhaps you need to be doing more high-intensity workouts. If you lift weights and see little effect, you might try riding a bike or rowing.

I love the notion that elite athletics is an experiment that we’re all participating in, from fans to scientists to coaches to the athletes themselves. We’ve haven’t been doing it for that long—evolutionarily speaking—but we’ve made massive progress. That progress seems to be slowing, but part of the reason why is that we’ve been treating that experiment like a group project, when in fact, it’s a personal one.

All of us who are trying to improve athletically—from gold medalists to you and me—are involved in an ongoing experiment with one subject. So there are lots of things that seem to work to improve performance for most people; there is almost nothing that works for everyone. Approach your professional performance like a scientist, and you’ll be on the path to discovering what works for you.

Data is Power

Peter Drucker’s now-famous quote, “What gets measured gets managed,” is especially true for sports. One of the things that draw many people to sports is that the final evaluation of your performance is so clear cut—just look at the scoreboard or the results sheet. Every day most of us go to work and do our jobs the best way we know how. But there’s no immediate sense of how well we’ve done. When I write a good sentence (as I hope I do from time to time), I have a sense of satisfaction, but there’s no score, no objective measurement.

Sports has the opposite problem—the focus on the competitive outcome can sometimes overshadow real process and improvement. But the key to understanding that progress is to collect data on it. Athletes have long been at the forefront of this movement, from keeping training logs to breaking down film, but now, with the wealth of technology we have available to collect and analyze information, the importance of gathering and managing data has never been higher.

Plus, there are surprising results simply from gathering information. In the mid-1920s at Western Electric’s manufacturing plant in Cicero, Illinois, the management began an experiment. The lighting in an area occupied by one set of workers was increased so there was better illumination to help them see the telephone relays they were building. Perhaps not surprisingly, workers who had more light were able to assemble relays faster.

Other changes were then made: Employees were given rest breaks. Their productivity increased. They were allowed to work shorter hours. Again, they were more efficient during those hours.

But then something weird happened. The lighting was cut back to normal…and productivity still went up. In fact, just about every change the company made had only one effect: increased worker productivity. After months of tinkering, the work conditions were returned to the original state, and workers built more relays than they did in the exact same circumstances at the start of the experiment.

What was happening? Why was it that no matter what the Hawthorne plant managers did, the workers just performed better? Researchers puzzled over the results, and some still doubt the details of the experiment’s protocols. But the study gave rise to what’s known in sociology as the Hawthorne effect.

The gist of the idea is that people change their behavior—often for the better—when they are being observed (which is why it’s sometimes called the observer effect). Those workers at Western Electric didn’t build more relays because there was more or less light or because they had more or fewer breaks. The Hawthorne effect posits that they built more relays simply because they knew someone was keeping track of how many relays they built. The same holds true with information about our bodies and fitness. Even just the act of collecting the data has power to change our behavior.

The ease with which we can gather data leads to new challenges, especially when it comes to extracting meaningful conclusions from it. But without the data itself, you’ll never know exactly what’s going on. If you don’t track your workouts, if you don’t test your fitness from time to time, you won’t know if you’re wasting your time in the gym, or if you’ve found a routine that really does help you. You’ll never know the results of the ongoing experiment that all of us are engaged in when it comes to our bodies and fitness, and you’ll never have any basis to make informed decisions.

Get The Basics Right

Not everything depends on the latest and greatest technology and advances. In fact, a constant refrain from athletes and coaches was that the first—and maybe most important thing—is to make sure that you take care of the basics well.

We’re all drawn to novelty, to the promise that there are breakthroughs that will enable us to move forward in huge leaps and bounds. But that’s not how things usually work in the athletic world; there aren’t a lot of easy huge leaps available to us any more. That means that in some ways, it’s execution of what you know to be true that’s most helpful, and not getting lost chasing some magic bullet.

What does that mean? It means ensuring that your form is correct when you’re doing strength training, not only to help prevent injury, but also to make sure that you’re getting the highest level of benefit from the effort. It means handling the basics of nutrition properly every day, instead of eating poorly and then hoping that supplementation can get you over the hump. It means doing all you can to get a good night’s sleep so you’re recovered optimally, and ready to work as hard as you can the next day. It means washing your hands so you don’t get sick at the worst possible moment.

At the elite level, you’d expect that most athletes get these things right. And usually they do. But a surprising amount of time, they don’t. Every Olympics you hear stories about athletes who binge on the food—especially the free fast-food from McDonald’s—at the Olympic Village and then have trouble competing. Or imagine the anguish that Eddie Hart (right) and Rey Robinson felt at the 1972 Olympics. The two sprinters had tied the world record in the 100 meters earlier that year, and had dominated their morning qualifying runs.

They went back to the Olympic Village to rest; their coach’s schedule for the evening rounds of the 100 meters said they wouldn’t run again before 7 p.m. Unfortunately that schedule was outdated, and at 4:17 p.m., the runners were watching what they thought was a replay of the morning session when they realized it was live coverage of the quarterfinals—races that they were supposed to be running in. They dashed to the stadium and protested about the schedule changes, but to no avail. Their chance of winning Olympic gold was gone.

Peter Vint at the U.S. Olympic Committee refers to Atul Gawande’s terrific book Better, which examines the quest to improve medical care. Gawande notes the same seductive quality of new research, but notes that “we have not effectively used the abilities science has already given us. And we have not made remotely adequate efforts to change that.” For Vint, it’s a reminder to ensure that we are diligent in implementing everything we know before we move onto the new.

The Only Sustainable Advantage is to Learn Faster

Arie de Geus was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell for 38 years, most prominently as the head of the company’s Strategic Planning Group. While he was there, Shell became one of the largest companies in the world, partly though de Gues’s group’s innovations in what’s called scenario planning, a technique that helps business and organizations develop flexible long-term plans by trying to envision scenarios that might play out in the future. In one example of how this scenario planning works, de Geus and his team in the mid-1980s had some research that suggested that the price of oil, which was then $28 a barrel, might begin to decline, perhaps down to $15 a barrel (in these days of $100 a barrel crude, this seems quaint).

De Geus and his team then went out into the organization at Shell and challenged leaders and managers to imagine a world where the price of oil did fall to $15 a barrel, and game out how they would react to such a situation. When the price of oil did plummet all the way to $10 a barrel, the company had the advantage of having considered what to do in a way that some of its competition hadn’t. “The fact that Shell had already visited the world of $15 oil helped a great deal in that panicky spring of 1986,” wrote de Geus in his famous paper “Planning as Learning.”

The importance of learning to an organization to de Geus was summarized in a saying he liked, which was repeated to me by UK Sport research chief Scott Drawer. “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

To Drawer, this is the principle that really great elite athletic organizations need to be built on. You may have better athletes or worse athletes – better employees or worse employees – and that will change over time. But you can still find ways to improve by ensuring that you’re always learning as quickly as you can. “It’s all about the pace at which you can move. You’ve got to be willing to take risks and try things out in high performance,” says Drawer. “Because even if it doesn’t work, you can learn from it. It’s the willingness to engage in that process that’s most crucial.”

De Gues’s quote is a good reminder that your competition may come up with innovations that haven’t occurred to you, whether it’s an invention like the British Cycling team’s heated warmup pants or a better protocol for altitude training. In some ways, that doesn’t matter—the advantage for something like that is fleeting. It can work once, but once the information is out in the world, you can adopt those innovations as your own.

But the trick is to make sure that you can, and quickly. Organizations and people become stuck in their thinking, in believing that everything has to be invented there. De Geus points out that, really, all you can do is keep your eyes and ears—and most importantly, your mind—open to all possibilities, with a willingness to try things and learn from them, whether you fail or succeed.

It’s the great joy and fear about working on the cutting edge of science and performance. Today’s greatest innovations are tomorrow’s baseline, and you have to keep moving forward. That’s the only way to continue our physical and intellectual growth as a species; that’s the only way we’ll continue to run faster, jump higher, and become stronger.

Adapted and excerpted from Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes—and What We Can Learn from Them by Mark McClusky. Reprinted by arrangement with Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Mark McClusky, 2014.

Photos: Getty Images