How Athletes Get Great
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How Athletes Get Great
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Re: How Athletes Get Great
#2Interesting 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.
Re: How Athletes Get Great
#3Interesting 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.
Your ignoring the chess example where 3,000 hours get some people to masters status but 25,000 is not enough for others. 10,000 was an average but a useless one because it's for 20 year olds and there is only so much free time before 20 and many need far less time which means others needed even more.
Re: How Athletes Get Great
#4Interesting 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.
Your ignoring the chess example where 3,000 hours get some people to masters status but 25,000 is not enough for others. 10,000 was an average but a useless one because it's for 20 year olds and there is only so much free time before 20 and many need far less time which means others needed even more.
> the chess example where 3,000 hours get some people to masters status but 25,000 is not enough for others
There are so many factors at play. One important one is environment...e.g. if your parents are chess masters and you've grown up watching them play, that's not being included as part of the 3,000 hours...and it should be, because the one with 10,000 hours might not have such an advantage.
Re: How Athletes Get Great
#5Interesting 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.
Your ignoring the chess example where 3,000 hours get some people to masters status but 25,000 is not enough for others. 10,000 was an average but a useless one because it's for 20 year olds and there is only so much free time before 20 and many need far less time which means others needed even more.
Fair enough. The 10,000 hour rule is not iron clad, more a suggestion. The point I'm trying to get at is it's more about routines that require practice rather than pure physical exertion. As in, "Deliberate practice contributes more to the outcome of playing violin and shooting baskets than it does to a 50 yard dash"
Re: How Athletes Get Great
#6I'm happy that at least someone is trying out the 10,000 hour rule empirically: http://thedanplan.com/
Re: How Athletes Get Great
#7When 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.
Re: How Athletes Get Great
#8Here'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.
Re: How Athletes Get Great
#9When 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 tha…
The effect of PEDs is also mediated by genetics. Take the grand-daddy of PEDs, testosterone.
Some people respond better to it than others. Some people have more testosterone receptors. Some people aromatise more of it into DHT or estrogen than others. Some people have more SHBG, a protein which disables sex hormones.
Variability in response happens for every PED. The introduction of PEDs has not removed selection, it's just changed the selection function.
Re: How Athletes Get Great
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your ignoring the chess example where 3,000 hours get some people to masters status but 25,000 is not enough for others. 10,000 was an average but a useless one because it's for 20 year olds and there is only so much free time before 20 and many need far less time which means others needed even more.
Fair enough. The 10,000 hour rule is not iron clad, more a suggestion. The point I'm trying to get at is it's more about routines that require practice rather than pure physical exertion. As in, "Deliberate practice contributes more to the outcome of playing violin and shooting baskets than it does to a 50 yard dash"
The Russians studied skill development in sport more than anybody. In weightlifting one of their leading coaches, Medvedyev, had a 7-year plan to take a promising 10 or 11 year from child to international competitiveness, planned down to the day.
As the plan progressed, the percentage of work dedicated to different training demands varied. By the time a trainee has pass into the final phase (Master of Sport International Class), he would only be performing the competition lifts for about 16% or 17% of overall training volume. The rest was taken up by a very large collection of assistance exercises, rotated as necessary.
After a while, the emphasis was on getting stronger. Their pattern of movement from tens of thousands of repetitions was sufficiently fixed that all that was left was maintaining the pattern and making them stronger.