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How Athletes Get Great

outsideonline.com

127 pointsj-g-faustus29 comments

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.

This is all very interesting, but how much do you squat? Let's quantify the progress in absolute terms we all understand, like pounds on a bar through full ROM

What does his squat max have to do the point above? Besides, he's an oly weightlifter not a powerlifter.

It's a lifting culture meme, popularized on Reddit.

Source: I hoist and read r/fitnesscirclejerk during when I eat.

Which is often, because I lift.

I once browsed reddit, and I have no idea who this guy is. He's lying.

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.

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.

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.

I've heard similar for other sports too... That their Judo and Wrestling training has very little competition and much more drilling and supplementary conditioning.

They had a cadre of sports scientists who worked on a range of sports and shared findings. I'm most familiar with weightlifting because that's my sport, but from one of my textbooks you can see how they applied common principles across a range of sports.

You can run in circles for long sometimes. I suppose the people who get stuck needs another teacher, context. Or just a time off. Sometimes you finally click for something you didn't understand 10 years earlier, for almost no reasons, but now your brain sees it. As weird as pleasurable.

In my own experience, the physical interface is a third of the skill. So I agree, the abstraction, perspective is far more important. Physical capacity to serve the need of an idea.

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

The problem is that the chess study shows that some people never became chess masters, no matter how many hours they practiced.

There was a hard upper limit to their performance that no amount of training could surmount. Insofar as "expert" is defined by relative ranking, some people will never become experts. Why? Because they are outranked by the "naturals".

The general problem with the Gladwell/Ericsson hypothesis is that it sorta-kinda suggests that practice is both necessary and sufficient to produce expert-level performance.

Everyone agrees on necessity. It is the question of sufficiency that is demonstrably false. People are different and are better suited to different endeavours; no amount or sort of training or practice can change the boundaries of your phenotypic potential.

You can move a long way from an average baseline in the direction of expertise -- humans are very malleable. But there are hard limits. Elite performers in any field are elite because they were better suited and then did the practice.

I think you are missing part of the results of Ericsson's research. He makes a very specific point to distinguish practice from deliberate practice. 10000 hours of practice is very different from 10000 hours of deliberate practice.

My interpretation of Ericsson's work is that natural talent can give certain individuals a head start in the beginning, but once you get into the domain of expertise, this head start at the beginning is very tiny and the effects of practice completely overpower it in comparison. However, I think in areas like sports - genetics do play more of a role. If you are less than 5 feet tall, you probably will not be an NBA point guard, even after 10000 hours of deliberate practice.

One of his papers for further reading:

From The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance

"Consider three general types of activities, namely, work, play,and deliberate practice. Work includes public performance, competitions, services rendered for pay, and other activities directly motivated by external rewards. Play includes activities that have no explicit goal and that are inherently enjoyable. Deliberate practice includes activities that have been specially designed to improve the current level of performance."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...

I'm familiar with the distinction that Ericsson made.

The chess study is based on people who deliberately practiced.

It still didn't matter. Some people are simply better at chess.

Seriously proposing that all humans everywhere have perfectly identical potential in all possible tasks is nonsensical. That is the strongest form of Ericsson's hypothesis. If you weaken the hypothesis -- eg. "some people take less time" -- then why only publish the exact 10,000 average and fail to show variances in the original study?

And if there is variance in time-to-expertise ... what exactly does the "training is required, but the time needed varies based on talent" finding tell us over ... training is required, but the time varies based on talent?

Because that's already kinda known.

And some people will never play in the NBA no matter how many hours they free-throw. Again, I'm not sure how the situations are different.

In some (marginal) cases, you lack a necessary feature of being an expert in X. I don't see how this breaks Gladwell's position.

Because performance is not usually a step function. It is a continuum. If it's a continuum, variance in training time to reach expertise is not surprising.

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

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.

In fairness to Ericsson and Gladwell, they didn't say "any old 10,000 hours will do". The basic hypothesis was, as you say, that it had to focused and deliberate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

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