We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance
nautil.us
nautil.us
That's not really true. Wilt Chamberlain was taller than Shaq, was a highly competitive track and field athlete in high school and college, was often the fastest player on his NBA team, had the strength to pick up or throw around other NBA players sometimes with just one hand, and had an incredible vertical leap as well. And, unlike Shaq, he did all this playing every single minute of every single game.
Like Shaq, however, Wilt Chamberlain's dominance led to rule changes, including widening the key.
Shaquille O'Neal was undoubtedly more powerful than any other center of his era, and almost any center of all time with the possible exception of Chamberlain. He was also relatively lean early in his career, but especially after he went to the Lakers, he increased his strength and body mass at the expense of his speed and agility.
The decline of the center position is really weird, though. The emphasis on three point shooting is driven by analytics--it turns out almost every player is more efficient shooting threes over midrange shots--so I wonder if a similar conclusion has been reached about the post game.
As to Lewis himself being clean, again watch the documentary there were only about 2 runners in that era (regularly making the finals) who were clean, the athletes know better than anyone.
Objectively Lewis was a full grown man and out of no where his jaw grew, displacing his teeth and he got braces to fix it as an adult. Jaw growth and braces were indicative of the steroids used at the time in the 80's and was common place with the track stars, who prior to jaw growth had perfect teeth.
Even in modern times in track what gave Russia's state sponsored doping program away was the simple fact that non doped athletes would be doubled over from fatigue at the end of events and the Russians would be smiling not even out of breath, like the article suggests world class is world class and so like I suggest the athletes will simply be in the best position to know when something is out of the norm.
As to Bolt, what makes him special as a sprinter is his size, once thought to be a detriment (like the article says), but he wasn't/isn't a freak, it is more along the lines of self fulfilling prophecy. Take Russia and China for example where they just pluck kids from school who are identified based on certain physical traits and go into state sponsored athletic training camps. Moreover, When you were a certain size you were just over looked by everyone including the coaches and put into different events, now that Bolt has broken the mold, tons of kids more inline with Bolt's body size are/have been identified and given the proper support and coaching, so in the near future we will see more and more sprinters similar to Bolt's measurements. This will inevitably lead to new world records in the short term without the need for genetic modification or peds.
Either way its obviously a side note and even if my memory serves correct, that's not to say HGH doesn't have a similar effect.
They're all "horse steroids," generally, as veterinarians are a common source of grey/black market AAS. Winstrol was likely very common then, as was Deca-Durabolin and Trenbolone. Obviously good old-fashioned injectable Testosterone [insert ester here] was used as well.
As for HGH, I'm not sure it was all that common in the 80s, or really even now. The benefits for adult males are... dubious, to say the least; it's not like testosterone which we know how valuable it can be for athletic performance.
Also Winstrol and Test Propionate (or Suspension) have short detection times, HGH didn't have a test until recently, and EPO was in the same boat.
I'm going to guess that drug tested athletes in the 80s were probably taking advantage of testosterone suspension due to its short clearance time, and difficulty to detect. We can catch it now if we screen within ~3 days of the last injection.
Maybe.
>without the need for genetic modification or peds
He is genetically modified, just in the slow, natural way.
As for "without the need for... PEDs," ah.... I doubt it. A friend of mine coached major D1 T&F and also coached 20+ Olympic Games sprint and field events athletes. His words could not be more clear: "No one runs sub 10.0 without cheating. No one."
Wikipedia says it's his real name though.
I wouldn't be so sure now that we identified bolt as better "feature"
You're exactly describing Emma Coburn after she had just won the 3000m steeplechase in London at the World Championships, a couple of weeks ago. Truth is the American that came in second place, Frerichs, look tired as hell, but that was because she had just "improved" her PB by 16 (sixteen) seconds. I guess miracles do happen if the correct juices are taken, those ladies reminded me of a certain Lance Armstrong who always seemed to achieve incredible athletics miracles whenever the Pyrenees were coming.
"However, even if the radar gun used last Friday gave Chapman 5 mph, his pitch still flirted with the maximum speed a human can throw a baseball, which Fleisig says is about 100 mph. Fleisig has found that adjustments to a pitcher's biomechanics, as well as better conditioning of the entire kinetic chain from the legs to the core to the arm, can improve a pitcher's velocity on his fastball. But he's discovered that as the pitcher approaches 100 mph, these tweaks and strengthening have diminishing returns.
"Another cause of the 100-mph ceiling owes to this: the amount of torque needed to throw in excess of the century mark is greater than the amount of force the ulnar collateral ligament (the elbow ligament Strasburg tore) can withstand before giving out, according to tests Fleisig has done on cadavers.
An addition quote from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/sports/baseball/harveys-in... .
"Fleisig, a biomedical engineer, knows what an arm can handle, and years of research give him the confidence to answer one of baseball’s more intriguing questions: Is there a limit to how fast a human being can throw?
"His answer: Yes, there is.
"And, he adds: That limit already has been reached.
"“Oh, there may be an outlier, one exception here or there,” he said. “But for major league baseball pitchers as a group of elites, the top isn’t going to go up anymore. With better conditioning and nutrition and mechanics, more pitchers will be toward that top, throwing at 95 or 100. But the top has topped out.”"
This will work until DNA testing becomes part of the standard anti-doping screening.
In any case, the author argues that "Athletic performance follows a normal distribution" and "The normal distribution we see in athletic capabilities is a telltale signature of many small additive effects that are all independent from each other."
I wanted to give a counter-example. Normal distributions don't have the hard cutoff that we've seen in pitching speeds.
Edit: "No other primate throws with anything comparable to human force. Chimpanzees, who are much, much stronger, pound for pound, than human beings, can throw, as any zoo visitor knows. But the best an adult male can do is about 20 miles per hour. A 12-year-old human pitcher can easily throw three times that fast." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/science/evolution-on-the-m...
The hypothesis is that early humans, "around 1.8 million years ago ... [began] to hunt big game and needed to throw sharp objects hard and fast", or perhaps it was only "hundreds of thousands of years".
In either case, it appear that humans have specifically evolved for throwing, with most of the energy coming from the shoulders, not from long or cord-like tendons. Our genetics may already be near the optimal, with respect to single point mutations.
Not only might cheetah ligaments and muscles make little difference, they might actually be worse.
However, will cheetah muscles be better? We don't know.
This possibility is strongly in the speculation part at the end of essay. It's science fiction at this time.
We might instead have nanomachines which augment the muscles and tendons. Is that more likely to occur first? (To avoid detection, smuggle it into the body through a glass of water, and have it geolocated so it breaks down quickly into normal body waste products.)
that's not really true. as someone who can throw a baseball quite fast, you really want relaxed shoulders. tense shoulders are a great way to get injured.
from my experience throwing, most of the throwing power is generated from the hips. then it comes up your lats on your back which generates a whipping motion through the shoulder. you want this energy transfer from the hips to the arm to be as smooth as possible, hence loose shoulders. near the end of the throw, the triceps and then forearm engage to complete the whip. other than knowing this from throwing, it's pretty easy to know because these are the muscles that are sore when i haven't thrown in a long while.
"The shoulder and arm and the rest of the body involved in the throwing motion must be storing elastic energy,"
"Several developments in anatomy allowed humans to throw this way, he said, including a waist that allows twisting and a relatively open shoulder, compared with those of other primates like chimpanzees."
"“You’re storing energy in your shoulder,” Dr. Roach said, ... “It works just like a slingshot would. You’re actually stretching the ligaments.”
"What is new in Dr. Roach’s study, say anatomists, is the idea of the shoulder’s functioning like a slingshot, and tying the specific anatomical changes to the fossil record."
"“I don’t believe that Homo erectus had the broad shoulders that would have given him the ability” to throw the way humans do."
Note that I said nothing about tense vs. relaxed shoulders.
The NYT summary links to the actual paper, which is at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v498/n7455/full/nature1... . Some quotes from it:
"Here we use experimental studies of humans throwing projectiles to show that our throwing capabilities largely result from several derived anatomical features that enable elastic energy storage and release at the shoulder."
"Throws are powered by rapid, sequential activation of many muscles, starting in the legs and progressing through the hips, torso, shoulder, elbow and wrist. Torques generated at each joint accelerate segmental masses, creating rapid angular movements that accumulate kinetic energy in the projectile until its release. It has been shown that internal (medial) rotation around the long axis of the humerus makes the largest contribution to projectile velocity."
I wasn't sure, so I looked up humerus. Wikipedia says "The humerus ... is a long bone in the arm or forelimb that runs from the shoulder to the elbow."
"Calculations of the maximum power-production capacity of all of the shoulder’s internal rotator muscles indicate that these muscles can contribute, at most, half of the shoulder rotation power generated during the throwing motion"
"We propose that several evolutionarily novel features in the human shoulder help to store and release elastic energy to generate much of the power needed for rapid humeral rotation during human throwing."
Those seem to say that most of the power comes from the shoulder, though the hips and other parts of the body of course play a role.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulnar_collateral_ligament_reco... halfway claims you won't throw faster than before if you get that operation, but I'm not convinced those are objective statements; _if_ this were to make you a faster pitcher, and that became generally known, I would think the MLB would be under pressure to forbid it, and the surgeons making those statements would lose customers willing to pay lots of money for these operations. Also, if the tendon is the factor limiting speed, putting in a stronger one should lead to increase speed)
One surgical procedure that is performance-enhancing, and never gets cracked down on, is LASIK: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur...
IMO, a more likely mutation is smaller bones in the arm as they are not really needed. However, genetic changes or say a missing pinky finger are unlikely to show up as the number of pitchers with a real shot at the top is a small subset of humanity. Further, the ball is not going to get lighter so again heavy diminishing returns.
The parent says a "stronger ligament" was a solution which is a question of Force. AKA if the only limit is really the forces acting on that tissue how much stronger must it be. Clearly at some point if you strengthen that part of the system then something else will become the limiting factor.
But this is becoming more and more detached from reality of the majority of us sitting inside the genetic bell curve.
Finding time in lives dominated by commutes, education and young families, finding sport that can be integrated into our lives, and building a society that encourages moderate athleticism should be a priority - shaving another second off a sprint does not it seems encourage millions to get off the couch - so we should invest in what does.
Otherwise sport is just another branch of the entertainment industry.
In 1936, Jesse Owens won the Olympics with a 10.3. Athletic.net[1] (which is not perfectly complete but close enough for reference) shows 33 high schoolers who ran 10.39 or better in 2017. So yes some are faster, but that's almost zero and 80 years later. None of these high schoolers have matched the 9.55 at the 1968 Olympics.
[1]: https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Division/Event.aspx?D...
Jesse Owens also ran in terrible spikes on an ash cinder track. Jesse would threaten to break 10 flat if they used today's equipment with the very hard tracks in use today.
I'm not disagreeing, though something has caused millions to get off the couch.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in December 2012 the number of Australians jogging or running as a sport or recreation has almost doubled since 2005–06.[1]
In the US, in 2015 there were a total of 30,300 races, up 8% from 28,000 in 2014 with 17.1 million finishers reported across all road race distances.[2]
1. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/4177.0Media%2...
2. https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/running-industry-trends-runn...
That is the nice and easily measurable 17million racers in marathons are most likely office workers who train in off hours as opposed to farmers walking hundreds of miles across fields or builders carrying bricks.
Our work has become so much less demanding that taking up racketball does not compensate and marathons barely.
This ignores the (very likely) possibility that Bolt is also doping, albeit with today's designer drugs and not anabolic steroids. When testing catches up to today's drugs, we will look back at Bolt differently. He is definitely a "genetic freak" as they say, but there's more to it than that.
Michele Ferrari is pretty despised in the cycling scene but the research he was doing really highlighted what's possible with sports science
That seems to be the crux of it.
Genetic outliers, yes. When I hear a phrase like "limits of athletic performance", though, I don't expect to read about genetic outliers, which, to me, are wholly uninteresting. The real limits of athletic performance if we mean genetic don't even end with humans.
Was hoping that this was going to be about people not fulfilling their athletic potential overall. This seems to be getting worse for the average person. I think we pay too much attention to genetic freakishness instead of the average, on many accounts.
Based on how blatant the difference is in other contexts (most obviously modern bodybuilding), I'm guessing that's actually the difference between people who got caught and people who didn't get caught, not the difference between doping and no doping.
But the 1st order thing steroids will do is just make you stronger, immediately, by themselves, even if you don't train differently (or at all!)
The 1st order thing taking EPO or doing blood doping will do is just give you more aerobic endurance, immediately, by itself.
No doubt some 2nd order benefit may result from also being able to train harder / recover faster while using these drugs.
Given the limits of what the human body can do within a weight class, a 10% boost in your total for the same weight class is huge. The article saying it's "modest" I think is misleading: while it's true 10% is small on an absolute scale, it's huge on a competitive scale.
To give an idea how overwhelming doping is on weightlifting performance, the IWF reset all the records in 1992 and again in 1998 as the old world records were essentially unbeatable as drug testing got better.
(Edit) If you're interesting in a very detailed essay on the topic, I enjoy reading Greg Nuckols: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/steroids-and-strength-diff...
I'm more familiar with athletics, where higher testosterone levels are massively beneficial in women's sprint events.
Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
The current crop of athletes have already essentially devoted their entire lives to eating/training etc just right so I think any further advances will be marginal. These aren't enthusiasts doing stuff on weekends anymore - they've got state level backing and large scale selection from a young age (see China).
(Above excludes possibility of genetic engineering obv).
And if the UCL is indeed the limiting factor, it's not hard to imagine a future where the ligament will be surgically enhanced via some kind of synthetic graft.
I'm not convinced - biocompatibility is a bitch. Whenever someone tears e.g. an UCL or an ACL, there are no options other than transplanting in a human graft, either taken from the patient (often parts of the hamstring) or from a corpse.
This isn't true anymore. Internal brace method is the most common advancement. There are other less ethical ones being done by select surgeons, too.
The UCL is not the limiting factor; it just gets torn from use. The tissue itself does not stop people from throwing harder than 105+ MPH. There are videos of people throwing baseballs 109 MPH from running starts and their arms don't explode; they also throw 3 oz balls 115+ MPH and their UCL doesn't tear. The UCL is not a governor.
As for the synthetic graft, it already exists. We call it internal brace method, designed by Dr. Jeffrey Dugas. One surgeon even weaves fibers into the UCL to strengthen it and he calls it the Superband surgery. There is almost no information on that surgery, probably because the person who does it has been sanctioned twice by the AMA.
That explains it. Come to the USA, it is the exact opposite.
"New WHO analysis shows alarming rates of overweight children ... According to a new report published by the WHO Regional Office for Europe, being overweight is so common that it risks becoming a new norm in the WHO European Region. For example, up to 27% of 13-year-olds and 33% of 11-year olds are overweight. ... Some countries have managed to contain the epidemic; France and some Scandinavian countries at least keep it at a stable level" - http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/243400/N...
"Obesity rates in France are among the lowest in the OECD, but have been increasing steadily ... Obesity rates are relatively low among children too, and have not been growing over the past 20 years" - http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/obesityandtheeconomic...
Perhaps you don't know what overweight looks like because you are used to the "new norm"?
"More than a third of overweight teenagers do not regard themselves as too heavy and think they are about the right weight, a study in England shows. ... Over the last few decades, studies in adults have hinted that fewer people are able to spot when they are overweight. And scientists speculate that the rising levels of obesity across the population might have "normalised" the idea of being overweight or obese, making it harder to recognise the extra pounds." - http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33453456
As inequality around the world grows, so will obesity, so at median, people will get less fit, while the outliers will become more athletic.
Children who grow in the upper middle class or upper class will grow up with access and encouragement to participate in physical activities, parents who are better informed and able to construct healthier eating habits and the resources and cultural permission to use mental health professionals as needed.
Winning a 100 million jackpot after growing up poor can't change that.
Obesity used to be heavily correlated with being a member of the aristocracy. Gout used to be a disease of the rich. Now everyone has the opportunity.
Amazing Discovery: Plant Blood Enables Your Cells To Capture Sunlight Energy Posted on: Tuesday, May 12th 2015 http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/chlorophyll-enables-your-ce...
Of course, we aren't covered with chloroplasts, not even close. So we're talking at best a teeny-tiny amount of what we need to live. There's very little reason for evolution to conserve these pathways[0]. Especially since we know that people can survive and be healthy on a meat-only diet in the arctic, where they are covered in clothes. This includes western Europeans who have not had any genetic adaptations for that climate or diet.
[0] The photosynthetic systems must not be digested, must be transported through the blood to the whole body, make it through the cell walls to get to the mitochondria, be maintained at the right concentration, with some way to excrete the waste products.
If you're going to downvote empirical studies, please provide a relevant bibliography or citations.
But why would anyone care? we suffer fools dumping taxpayer dollars into ludicrous athletic programs for lesser colleges and mostly empty new stadium sky boxes for corporate lobbyists.
Passive viewing of sports and entertainment is dull. Attentions and dollars are better devoted to efficient live musical performance. So many of my fellow DC software engineers turned out to be talented instrumental musicians. I presume that early ambidextrous and symbolic training cultivating skilled code slinging applied mathematicians is not coincidental.
My consulting firm did some work in drug discovery. We were already tapped out on brute force discovery by the 1990's. Elective medicine seems indefensible feeding kids synthetic food and leaded water.
Encouraging kids to suffer supersized heroes on drugs beating dogs and women is unwise. My own mathlete kid watches ZERO TV And loves Aikido.
Has demographic crisis, boredom and research attentions wasted on militaries driven good people mad?