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How Athletes Get Great

by j-g-faustus on 8/12/13, 3:35 PM with 29 comments

• by jacques_chester on 8/12/13, 11:50 PM

  Here's another fairly thorough examination of the 10,000 hour idea:

  http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/08/talent-training-and-...

  Key points:

  1. Ericsson only published averages. Nobody else has seen the raw data. He didn't even give standard deviation or error bars.

  2. "Talented" people get more positive feedback and so practice more.

  3. There are so many observable phenotypal inputs and as yet unobserved phenotypal inputs into sports performance that pinning it to a single variable (hours of deliberate practice) is nuts.

  My sport is Olympic weightlifting.

  Some people will never be Olympic champions, no matter how hard they train. Factors affecting performance include:

  * Height.

  * Relative anthropometry: long legs are worse than short legs. Long torsos are better than short torsos. Long arms are better for the snatch, worse for the clean and jerk.

  * Fast-twitch fibre / slow-twitch fibre ratios.

  * Tendon insertion geometry.

  * Muscle-belly / tendon ratio.

  * Pelvic geometry.

  * Soft tissue robustness.

  * Natural hormonal environment: ratios, natural circulating testosterone and DHT, amounts of SBHG.

  * Placement and density of testosterone receptors in muscle tissue.

  * Myostatin production.

  These are basic physiological qualities that cannot be changed by any amount of training. While the statistics show that lifters who start younger out-perform lifters who start later (because it's a high-skill sport and childhood neuroplasticity is much higher), the historically and currently dominant countries in weightlifting have gotten there by simply having much larger pools of candidates to find genetic outliers in.

• by mathattack on 8/12/13, 5:52 PM

  Interesting article. I think when it comes to pure physical sports they're missing some of the original point. The concept of 10,000 hours is about developing a skill, not becoming physically gifted. Michael Jordan's 10,000 hours come from shooting and knowing where to go where the ball will be, more so than just being the most physically gifted.

• by dvt on 8/13/13, 1:24 AM

  I don't think that Epstein is being very charitable with Gladwell's 10,000 figure. Gladwell:

  a) Doesn't make the 10,000-hour figure a rule as both Epstein and Repanich would have us believe.

  b) Fully concedes that there are myriads of other factors that have an effect on how one reaches "expert status".

  I'm also not sure how Epstein can claim that the chess master study is somehow disanalogous with the athlete one. An expert athlete might have some physical advantage over your "average Joe": speed, lean muscle, endurance, height, etc., etc. Similarly, one can say that an expert chess player may have some neurophysiological advantage over the "average Joe": better-formed synaptic pathways, higher attention span, etc., etc. I don't think there's any difference between an expert chess master or an NFL quarterback.

  Both might have some genetic advantage; both have trained extensively. The idea behind Gladwell's figure is not that you can practice X for 10,000 hours and then you will instantly be an expert at it, but merely that after 10,000 hours (of deliberate practice plus a number of contingencies) you can expect to be somewhere in the realm of expertness.

  There are plenty of other studies that favor this hypothesis; in particular, some very interesting double-blind identical twin studies[1].

  Outside of extreme cases (e.g. I am 4'11'' and want to play in the NBA; I have an IQ of 90 and want to be an astronaut), I think Gladwell is right on the money: practice is more important than talent.

  [1] http://www.indiana.edu/~jkkteach/P335/shanks_expertise.html

• by everettForth on 8/12/13, 11:34 PM

  I'm happy that at least someone is trying out the 10,000 hour rule empirically: http://thedanplan.com/

• by jackschultz on 8/13/13, 12:40 AM

  I played high level golf for a while and a lot of these articles forget the two main rules I've learned from it. The first is intense practice. This means devoting 100 percent to every repetition. This is obviously difficult because of, among other things, repetition is inherently boring. Luckily for golf, there are an infinite number of shots to practice, and working on all of them should break up the monotony. This leads into the second rule for practice, which is to vary what you work on. For golf, this means playing different shots from all different locations. Besides making it more interesting, it makes you go through the actual process that you would encounter on the course.

  This generalizes to other activities easily. The best practice I've found comes from complete effort in game/competition like environments.

• by clarky07 on 8/13/13, 1:45 AM

  Interesting notes / anecdotes from me about 10,000 hours and genetics.

  I played golf at a pretty high level throughout high school and college. I practiced and played golf on most days for 8 straight years. I'm sure I reached 10k hours. Currently, I don't have almost any time to practice and play golf. I haven't practiced or played regularly in at least 6 years. Yet, playing once every 2 months or so I'm still able to shoot at or near par most of the time. I suspect this has more to do with the 10k hours of practice than my natural abilities. Not really any way to prove that, but I suspect a similarly athletic person who hasn't put in that practice wouldn't generally shoot par playing 6 times a year.

• by kumarski on 8/13/13, 3:04 AM

  There's some interesting research done on myostatin. It's a protein that inhibits muscle differentiation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myostatin

  Genetic advantages are interesting.

• by rickdale on 8/12/13, 11:45 PM

  When I was 14 I was fed up with kids on my soccer team not wanting to win as much as me. I quit soccer and picked up tennis. Looking back, a large part of my inspiration to pick up tennis was I just wanted to see if anyone could actually learn to do anything. I was never great, and didn't bloom until the end of my junior career, but it did land me a partial scholarship and probably got me into some better schools than my grades and test scores show. Taught me a lot about life though, and really thats how athletes become great.

  Another way athletes become great though, in all seriousness, is they hack their bodies with PEDs. Seems to me like sports these days are flooded with it.

• by Mustafabei on 8/13/13, 7:10 AM

  "One of the coolest things is genetically tailored diet and training. It won’t be perfect because we still don’t know what most genes do. But exercise genetics will potentially produce some of the most widely used and effective medicine. You may be able to tell people how they can train to get a certain health benefit instead of taking a drug, or maybe that they can’t get that benefit with training so they do need a medication. Also, injury predisposition genes are coming online right now. It would be nice to know more than just through straight trial and error what’s the best training for your and how you can avoid injury."

  This.

• by jwillgoesfast on 8/13/13, 1:49 AM

  "Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else" by Geoff Colvin is the best book on this topic that i've read.