Training, talent, 10000 hours and the genes

Genes and performances: Why some are more equal than others

The genetic influence on exercise performance is dizzyingly complex.  So complex that my best efforts to explain how genes may impact on the science of performance will fail to capture just how enormously complex the various interactions are.  It is so complex that despite the best efforts of scientists to find "the performance genes", they have failed.  This has been interpreted in some quarters to mean that these genes don't exist, that genes are unimportant and that training counts for all - nothing could be further from the truth.  The reality is simply that they're too numerous, with too small an influence, and too complex to find...for now.

However, having previously discussed the 'holes' in the theory that success in sport can be explained by deliberate practice, it's important to consider the genetic component.  When I presented evidence that showed, for example, that only 28% of variance in darts performance could be explained by 15 years of practice time, then it begs the question of where the remaining 72% lies?  When you consider that some athletes are able to become world-class within 12 months of taking up a sport, whereas others slog for a lifetime to stay mediocre, part of the reason may lie in the genes.

And of course, this is enormously complex.  So let me say this upfront today:  The science of success is about the coming together of dozens, perhaps hundreds of factors.  Practice, quality coaching and time spent learning are clearly key factors - this is why you get "hot-beds" of performance, exceptional athletes from anywhere that opportunities exist - the impact of training on performance is large enough that it can help to offset potential differences in innate abilities.  Can it turn anyone into a world-beater?  My opinion is no, but this doesn't decrease the value of the training.

Equally valuable, I believe (and some of the early evidence is below) are genes or innate ability, and this is what has been downplayed in the popular media.  It is not wrong to suggest that practice is crucial and that elite performers do many hours of training. But it is incomplete. And sometimes, incorrect, when you promote one at the expense of the other - training and genes are additive, not exclusive.  So when Ericsson writes in his 2009 paper that:

"distinctive characteristics of exceptional performers are the result of adaptations to extended and intense practice activities that selectively activate dormant genes that are contained within all healthy individuals’ DNA” (Ericsson et al 2009)

it must be challenged on the basis that the science may not necessarily support this.

And to help complete the picture, we look at genes - that is the context of this post.

As mentioned, I have recently written two review articles on this subject - one will be published in Dialogues in Cardiovascular Medicine to co-incide with next year's London Olympic Games, the other will hopefully be published in 2012.  My co-author, Prof Malcolm Collins, is a geneticist, and I owe a debt of gratitude to him for some of the genetic concepts I explain in this post.  So let's look at genes and performance.

The most powerful genetic influence of performance is...

At the risk of starting with the blindingly obvious, the first key point to make is that the single biggest impact made by any factor on sports performance is genetic, and it is biological sex.  Before people react negatively to that statement, please don't view it is a statement of superiority or inferiority - it is simply a fact, and is the very reason we recognize (and embrace) separate categories for competition.  Ask the following question:  If we did NOT recognize that men and women should compete in separate categories in most sports, how many women would be competitive?

Take marathon running - Paula Radcliffe holds one of the most respected records in athletics with her marathon world record.  That performance, easily the best ever by a woman, would have ranked her 473rd in an "open" world list in 2009 alone.  That is, 472 men were faster than this time in a single year.  In history, the time was ranked 3,205th, and that was in 2009 - it's now probably close to 4000th.

This gap exists in all athletic disciplines ranging from 100m to 100km - a 10 to 15% difference between the best men and women is seen across the board.  Of course, the differences may be smaller in other sports - skill-based activities that are not heavily influenced by size, strength, heart or lung volume, hemoglobin content etc may be more competitive.  But the difference still exists (would you back Serena or Venus Williams against Federer or Nadal?), and the result is that if we competed in only one category, no major sporting prize would ever be won by a female competitor.

This is the very reason that we recognize separate competitions - they enable competitiveness.  And the point is that this characteristic, biological sex, is entirely genetically determined.  There are of course cases where the neat binary system we create is skewed by intersex conditions, and we debate and discuss cases like Caster Semenya's endlessly.  In those instances, there is a mismatch between genetic and anatomical sex, such that the chromosomes no longer determine the biology.  However, genetics is entirely responsible for male and female characteristics, and this has an enormous impact on performance.

The question is, if genes exert such an enormous impact on the entire organism, are there similar genetic differences within each grouping, and do these affect various systems (muscle, heart, physiology) in the same way?

Genetic complexity - height as an example of complexity

The next illustration is height.  It's well established that height is a highly heritable characteristic. In fact, 80% of height has been linked to a number of genes (it's called a polygenic trait because many genes influence it), with the remaining 20% being down to environment and diet.

The key about height is that as "simple" a characteristic as it is, it is still impossible to identify all the specific genes and the contributions they make to it, how they interact.  And here, it's important to understand the approaches to the problem.  One can look for single genes - they are called "candidate genes" - that account for the biggest impact in height.  But because even something as relatively simple as height is polygenic, there is no single candidate gene.

There is not even a group of genes.  In fact, if you really want to get down to it, you have to do what are called Genome Wide Association Studies, where you look at the entire genome at once and look for how variations from one person to the next might account for different traits, like performance (or disease, for example).

And when you do this, the numbers become staggering.  Most recently, a paper in Nature Genetics found that you could explain 45% of the variance in height by using 3,925 unrelated people, and a staggering 294,831 different SNPs.  A SNP (pronounced snip), just to explain, is a DNA sequence variation, where for example Andrew might have a gene with a certain sequence, whereas Matthew has the same gene, but with a single change, a single 'different letter', that alters the function or effect of that gene.

In other words, it's not even as simple as having a gene or not, it now becomes a question of which variant in the gene you have!  If this is getting complicated, don't panic - it's because it is complicated!  The bottom line is that there is no such thing as a single gene that makes one person tall and another short.  There are hundreds of thousands of different gene variants, and these variations change the phenotype (the effect of the gene) so that you and a friend may have the same gene but because your SNPs differ, you have different traits or characteristics.

Let's just go back to that height finding, which bears repeating:  Height is almost certainly simpler than something as complex as human athletic performance, yet it requires almost 300,000 different genetic variants, and that helps us explain only 45% of it.  How many more SNPs or genes or DNA sequence variations might it take to explain sprint or endurance performance?  And this is why when you read that the latest studies have failed to find a gene that explains why Jamaicans are so fast, you should interpret it with the right insight because:

• they are often looking for a 'candidate gene' (or small collection of genes), which is a huge oversimplification of performance as a polygenic trait, and;
• there are simply not enough elite athletes in the world to be able to do the study that finds significant associations between that many SNPs and performance.  If it takes 4,000 people to explain less than half of height, then how many more may be required to explain sprint performance, of which height is only a small contributor?

This is also why those genetic tests that supposedly tell eager parents whether little Tim is going to be a sprinter or a distance runner are so over-rated.  These tests screen for several genes, including perhaps the most "famous" performance gene ACTN3, which is supposedly linked to elite sprinting performance.

The problem is, the studies comparing Jamaican sprinters and east African distance runners find no differences for that particular gene.  I hope I've shown you why this may be the case.  In the words of Prof Stephen Roth, one of the world's leading experts on genes and performance "It looks like the gene does contribute something, but only a very small amount at the very, very elite levels".  "Several genes" will sadly explain very little, except in rare cases.  And performance is not one of them.

So there is no single genetic predictor of success (or even of height), but this does not mean that genetics don't count towards success.  We are limited by our capacity to measure how these many thousands of gene variants interact, as the next study of training responses shows.

Genes and training responses:  Responders and non-responders

The next level of our genetic journey is to ask how genes impact on our ability to adapt to training?  This is clearly vital for aspirant elite athletes - whether or not you still believe in 10,000 hours, it's quite clear that some people adapt faster to training than others, or are able to more rapidly acquire skills than others.

The study that is needed to answer this question is to take a large, random group of people and expose them to training, and then to measure how much they improve.  And this has been done.  There are four studies, summarized in the figure below, where big groups have been put through a supervised training programme, and their VO2max measured as an index of fitness.

So, on average, VO2max will improve by 15% as a result of training.  In some studies, it's been as high as 19%, in others, 9%.  This may be due to differences in the training programme, or the people involved.  However, what you should be asking, especially given our look at Ericsson's violin study and the chess paper, is "What are the individual differences that make up that 15%, and what is the genetic impact in these studies?"

And for this, a paper by Claude Bouchard earlier this year.  In this study, 470 untrained volunteers were put through five months of training, and their fitness levels measured before and after.  The figure below shows the result:

As you might expect, most people improve by average amounts - 38% of the volunteers improved by between 300 and 500 ml/min (shown by they yellow and green bars in the breakdown of responders section).  But either side of these "typical responses", you see the extremes - the "low responders" shown in reds and oranges, and the "high responders" shown in blues and purples.  4% of the volunteers improved by 800ml/min or more, whereas 7% improved by less than 100ml/min.

Overall, there was a range of changes in VO2max all the way from 100ml/min (basically no improvement) to over 1000ml/min.  That's a 10-fold difference.  You may recall that yesterday, we saw how chess expertise showed an 8-fold difference between the fastest and slowest to succeed at reaching Master level.  It seems that a similar range of responses occurs for physiology.

The end result is that the bottom 5% of the sample, those who responded the least, improved their VO2max by less than 4%.  On the other end, the high responders, the top 5%, improved by 40%.  That is an astonishing difference, and the simple, and obvious question is where are you most likely to find an endurance athlete in this sample?  The answer is on the far right - the individual who shows large adaptations to training, improves quickly and then reaches a higher ceiling.  I am sure that every one of you reading this knows one of each of these people, perhaps you are one of them!

Note that this study does not take into account that ceiling, and nor does it account for the starting point.  Both of these may be influenced separately, and ideally what you need is a person who starts high, shows this kind of high response, and they are most likely to be the endurance achievers.

In terms of the genes, where's the link?  Well, Bouchard performed a genome-wide association study and was able to identify 21 of those previously mentioned SNPs (genetic DNA variations) that accounted for 49% of the difference in the training response.  As we saw for height, 49% is pretty solid, especially with only 21 SNPs - it suggests that height is not so simple...!

One of those SNPs was in fact responsible for about 6% of the training response, and as far as a single SNP goes, that's a pretty powerful association.  The figure below shows the association between SNPs and training response:

It turned out that the non-responders were people who had fewer of these SNPs than the responders.  If a person carried 9 or fewer of the identified SNPs, they improved by an average of 9% (about half the average), whereas individuals who had 19 or more of the 21 SNPs improved by 26% (almost double the average).  The three-fold difference between the responders and non-responders could thus be attributed to the presence of these sequence variations.  Not the genes - I can't stress enough that the search for a single gene is futile because performance is just too complex.  But rather individual variants that make up the response of VO2 to training.

And again, this is just one component of performance - think of the hundreds of other physiological attributes that make up an elite athlete.  The reality is that our failure to find a performance gene may be more a reflection on our capacity to understand the complexity of physiology and genes than it is an indication that genes don't make a significant impact.

The key genetic question: Same training, different responses?

The most powerful question, then, in my opinion, based on the above study, is the following thought-experiment:

If you took 470 volunteers from Kenya, and gave them the same training as was given to the 470 in the Bouchard study above, would you find the same range of non-responders to responders? Would you find that 7% of Kenyans improve their VO2max by less than 100ml/min?  And would you find that 4% improve by 800ml/min or more?

I would hypothesize that the whole curve would be shifted way over to the right - there would of course be low and high responders.  But the lower responders in the Kenyan sample, would, I suspect, be fewer and perhaps would improve by 200ml/min, not 100ml/min.  As for high responders, instead of finding only a few who improve by 40%, you may find many more.  This would be the indication of a genetic advantage - not that every single person is superior, but that within a given population (470 people in this case), you are more likely to find the physiological characteristics of a champion athlete in one group than in another.

And as soon as you super-impose the opportunity, the competitive environment, the altitude, the diet, the psychology, the culture and belief, the lifestyle, then you have the recipe for a distance champion - Kenya succeeds not because they have these factors, but because they apply these factors to an exceptional genetic pool.

Jamaica has the same scenario for speed, I would hypothesize:  a concentrated group of individuals who possess the necessary physiological attributes to run fast, and to respond enormously to power and sprint training.  Then onto that, you add the history, the role-models like Usain Bolt, the school competition, the excellent coaching, the culture of the island, and the result is the perfect mix to produce athletes who may well go on to win half a dozen Olympic gold medals.

No alchemy in elite sport - start with the right materials

But it all starts with the genetic potential.  In high performance sport, there is no such thing as alchemy - you do not make gold out of other metals.  If you want to produce a champion, a gold medal, then you must start out with the right raw materials.  Everyone will improve as a result of training.  Some, the lucky few, will start out at a level that is higher than the rest, and will improve more rapidly through training.  That this is linked to genes is, in my reading of the evidence, unquestionable.

There are other arguments, of course.  Some are obvious - your body size is strongly influenced by genes, and it limits the sports available to you.  For example, if you're 1.70m tall and weigh 70kg, you won't be playing high level rugby or American Football.  And definitely not basketball.  If you are 2.00m tall and weight 110 kg, then basketball or rugby are options, whereas long distance running probably isn't.  But these are almost absurd illustrations of how genes, which clearly determine these aspects of our physical makeup, influence performance.  But if this is true of these traits, then would it not be the case for something like hemoglobin, muscle enzyme activity/content, plasticity of the nervous system and motor skills?

Rate of performance improvement - a key symptom of innate ability

Last example - I was asked yesterday in a presentation on this subject whether a parent should try to 'diagnose' their child's potential using the genetic tests.  I explained above that these tests have very limited potential to do this, to the point of being useless.  It did get me thinking though about what we look for to detect whether those genes are present.  How does one know that a person has innate ability over and above the typical ability to learn any activity?  And I believe the key, as illustrated by Bouchard's study, is the responsiveness to training.

Of course, the starting point is also crucial, especially for sports that are "physiologically limited" (like running, cycling, swimming, triathlon, where muscles, heart, lungs and brain provide a ceiling for ability).  But for skill-based sport, where training time does matter, the key is how quickly the skill or ability can be acquired - this is the symptom of the innate ability.  I was asked about the Polgar sisters, for example - these are three Hungarian sisters who were taught by their father to play chess to prove that "genius are made, not born".

The coaching of their father, along with professional chess players who were employed to teach the three girls the game,  produced outstanding chess players.  Two became grandmasters, one an international master. Judit Polgar is the most accomplished female chess player ever.  Their story is often cited as a nurture over nature example.

But there are problems with that theory.  First, the fact that they were all family doesn't allow you to exclude genes.  But more than this, when you read the story and start to see not only what they achieved, but when it was achieved, it's difficult to make the case for many hours of training being the secret of their success.

For example, Judit Polgar, at the age of five, defeated a family friend (an adult) without looking at the board.  She defeats her father (a decent level chess playing adult) at five, and beats a Master level player at seven, playing blindfolded!  Remember that yesterday we saw that on average, it takes 11,000 hours of practice to become a master, and you realize how exceptionally talented Judit was.  She then beats an international master player at 10, and a Grandmaster at 11.  These are accomplishments that precede "many hours" of training.

Her sister Susan wins a local chess competition for Under 11s at the age of 4.  Within the first year of their exposure to the activity, they demonstrate exceptional ability, long before the 10,000 hours, long before the deliberate practice can explain their obvious ability.  What makes these sisters exceptional is not simply that they accumulate hours of training, it is that their ability to learn the skills is astonishing - defeating a Master at 7, while blindfolded, given that at most, you've done maybe 3,000 hours of training, is just a staggering illustration of superior ability, developed through training, certainly, but not a performance that you'll find in most people.

Sure, in order to continue to the Grandmaster level, to become the best in the world, it required more training.  But the trajectory was clearly there early, it was a symptom of innate ability, and so this is an argument for genes just as much as it is deliberate practice.

The Polgar sisters, to sum up, are the sporting equivalents of Missy Franklin or Michael Phelps - precocious talents who achieve within the first few years what others take a lifetime to do, and will often fail.  That is as much an argument for innate ability as it is for deliberate practice.  The only experiment that proves nurture over nature is if you can take 100 children, unrelated, and train them all to reach the same level of performance.  The simple fact is that this doesn't happen, and the reason is, at least in part, innate ability.

Conclusion: Two valuable frameworks, both absolutely necessary

I don't think it's revolutionary to suggest that BOTH genes and opportunity are needed.  In the scientific community, you'd be laughed at for suggesting this.  Most people believe that it's a combination of both, and that's why the current models, the best models for performance, integrate all these factors.  One such model is shown to the right - it's a framework for talent ID and development from a 2008 Sports Medicine paper by Vaeyens (click to enlarge).  It clearly includes natural abilities, catalysts, environmental factors and even chance.  These are the basis for current sports science beliefs, and the theories put forward in the popular media, and by Anders Ericsson, unnecessarily and incorrectly oversimplify this.

I can appreciate the value of the deliberate practice framework proposed by Anders Ericsson, popularized by Gladwell, Syed, Coyle etc.  It reinforces that we must better manage our entire sports environment to ensure that more potentially successful athletes are exposed to good coaching, good diet, competition etc.  This has implications all the way up to government level, where policies around sport are determined.  For example, in South Africa, sport is less accessible than it should be, partly because of the removal of sport from our school curriculum.  We also have a dearth of coaches, and few facilities - these factors combine to greatly reduce the chance that we'll produce a Phelps, Franklin, or even a great distance runner, regardless of the talent we have.

But equally, the realization that certain individuals have innate abilities that will help them achieve elite levels is crucial.  It influences where money is spent, how young athletes are steered, how athletes are encouraged to transfer from one sport to another (think of the lifesavers and sprinters who were given a shot at the Olympics and skeleton because of the Australian Talent transfer).  This too has implications for policy, and even for parenthood, in terms of understanding whether a child should specialize early or be encouraged to be as diverse as possible with their sport choices.

All in all, it's a fascinating debate, and thank you for your inputs and contributions to the debate so far.  As always, my aim is to have the first word in a debate, not the last, so I welcome more inputs.  In this post, I've proposed my theory, based on the early gene studies that are associating exercise performance with genes.  I've tried to highlight the complexity, and to illustrate that all is not as it seems.

The rest is for future studies, but I'll leave it with my ultimate conclusion.  To become an Olympic champion, the very best of the best, you need to tick the boxes.  Genes is without a doubt one of those boxes.  But so too are opportunities.  And so is success genetics or training?  It's both.  In fact, it's 100% genetic, and 100% training.

Ross

Talent, training and performance: The secrets of success

Genes vs training:  The secrets of success

Apologies for the post-Tour de France "black hole" that was The Science of Sport! Following and analyzing three weeks of racing left the inevitable backlog of work, which also happened to pick up to warp-speed at the conclusion of the Tour!  However, recovery time now over, I am in the process of putting together the next series, which I'll start as soon as I can, on The Physiology of Pacing Strategies. That will be a video series, consisting of perhaps six or seven short videos, which will bring us neatly to the IAAF World Championships in Daegu.

Genes, innate ability and talent? Or practice makes perfect? Is it all in the training?

But for this week, a few posts on a topic that is both fascinating and, for me, very frustratingly hyped in the media (and, interestingly enough, within sports science as well), and that's the issue of genetics/talent vs training as a requirement for success. I recently co-authored a review on this for the journal Dialogues in Cardiovascular Medicine, and am busy working on a second review on the relative contribution of genes and practice to performance. Those articles will be published in 2012 (I'll let you know when).   I have also done a few presentations on this in the last few weeks, at the University and to the public, so it's a topic that I'm pretty immersed in at the moment.

And then last night, I received an email from a journalist with the Evening Standard of London, asking for some thoughts on a piece that they carried a few days ago.  It was an article called "Why we're the best", and it speaks about culture, practice, genes (or the lack thereof) and other factors that determine why, for example, Kenya produces great runners, China great table tennis players and Australia great swimmers.

You can read that piece here, but I just want to highlight some of the key phrases that warrant a mention, and then evaluate them critically.  I'll do this in two parts.  

1. The first (this post) will look at claims about the role of training and practice on performance
2. The second (later this week) will look at genes and how genetics may influence performance.

Why we win: Culture, practice but not really the genes?  Champions are born, not made?

The video below shows Matthew Syed, author of "Bounce" and he puts forwards some of the same concepts as the article.  It's worth a look, because Syed makes a number of claims that really need to be tested or questioned. Watch the video below, and take note of the following statements by Syed

"Any validity"
"Utterly transform the people we are"
"all about genetics"
"that's not what the science is saying"



Then the following are quotes from the Evening Standard article, which further reflect this thinking:

Success, he [Peter Keen, director of performance at UK Sport] said, was "massively culturally determined" as it dictates what you can "interact with and what is denied you" as a sportsperson. Tradition, success, climate factors, cultural factors - these are more important than some apparently fundamental drivers, such as genetics. 

"To be a high jumper it pays to be tall and this is true if you're Chinese or British," he continued. "But the simple truth of any successful athletic performance is a minimum of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. That is typically eight to 10 years of your life, two to three hours a day, motivated by the belief that you can be something special."

Later in the article, it talks about the failure to discover the "speed" or "endurance" gene:

But despite Professor Morrison's assertion, attempts to identify a generic speed gene are unsatisfactory.

The search has focused on a gene known as ACTN3. This is because there are two types of muscle fibres, slow twitch and fast twitch. Slow twitch fibres are more efficient in using oxygen to generate energy but fast twitch fibres fire more rapidly and generate more force. These are the ones believed to aid speed and ACTN3 is the gene considered key to their development. 

But despite huge testing programmes of Olympic athletes, not a single record-breaker has been identified with two copies of the variant in the gene. Dr Yannis Pitsiladis, who conducted tests for the University of Glasgow, says this means the impact of genes on identifying sporting excellence has too often been overstated. He adds: "To date there is zero predictive capacity in sports genetics."

Huge complexity, but an oversimplified, and unbalanced explanation

Let me start out by saying that culture, training, diet, opportunity are all crucial to producing sporting champions or elite performances.  But the problem with the debate as it stands is the relative dismissal of physiological factors like genes, and also the extremely oversimplified view that "it's all about the training", or that science suggests genes don't matter.  My purpose with these posts is thus not to dismiss the role of training, culture or belief, but rather to balance out the argument with the facts.

And in so doing, to give an indication of just how complex it really is - the only certainty is that whoever says that success is due to one or two things is wrong.

Testing the statements: The 10,000 hour concept

So there are a couple of claims in the above quotes from the article, and they're worth looking at a little more closely.  We start with the 10,000 hour claim in today's post.  Tomorrow, I'll look at the genes and the claims made about the absence of genetics.  

It is stated in the article that "the simple truth of any successful athletic performance is a minimum of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice".

Deliberate practice means dedicated training in that activity.  In this model, there is no such thing as talent transfer, and there is no is no allowance for accumulating training by play (this is a theory that has been challenged recently, but the deliberate practice model, which was proposed and really developed by Anders Ericsson, holds that only specific, dedicated training works.)

The origins of 10,000 hours

This 10,000 hour theory has its origins in a 1993 study by Ericsson, where he looked at the performance ability of violinists, and showed that the playing ability was determined by the cumulative hours of training up to the age of 20.  That is, the best experts had accumulated the magic number of 10,000 hours whereas those classified as merely "good" or "least accomplished" were found to have done only 8,000 or 5,000 hours of practice, respectively.  The graph below illustrates this main finding, where yellow and orange are the best performing violinists.  Clearly, the average time taken to get to the 'elite' level is 10,000 hours, at least when it comes to playing a musical instrument:

Exceptions to the norm:  What variance would indicate

There's another way to interpret this finding, which I'll get to later in the piece.  First, a major statistical "omission" in the paper undermines how the conclusion of Ericsson and those who argue for 10,000 hours can be made.

I have that study, and what is remarkable about it is that Ericsson presents no indication of variance - there are no standard deviations, no maximums, minimums, or ranges.  And so all we really know is that AVERAGE practice time influences performance, not whether the individual differences present might undermine that argument.  Statistically, this is a crucial omission and it may undermine the 10,000 hour conclusion entirely.

I must emphasize this point strongly: If the theory is that 10,000 hours of practice are needed, and there is no innate ability, then you should not find a single person who has succeeded with fewer than 10,000 hours, and nor should anyone fail having done their 10,000 hours.  Take a look at the graph below.  I've highlighted only the "best expert" and "least accomplished" players, and shown some hypothetical dashed lines to show the ranges within each group.  

It's conceivable that there is a range of practice times within each group, such that there is a person in the "least accomplished" group who does 10,000 hours (shown by the blue circle) without cracking that performance level, and a person who does less but succeeds (shown by yellow).

Unfortunately, Ericsson didn't show us this data, so we can only speculate.  But that didn't stop Malcolm Gladwell from making this statement in his book "Outliers":

“The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals”, musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.

Nor could they find any “grinds”, people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks.” – Outliers, pg 39

Again, I don't know how he arrives at the above statements - Ericsson presented not a single measure to support these claims (and I happen to know that he didn't interview him either).  As we'll see shortly, it is actually inconceivable that Gladwell's statements are true - other study of skilled performance show massive variations, and the same will be true for violinists, of this I'm certain.

But what he is saying above is that practice is NECESSARY (the first part of the quote - no one succeeds without doing the time), and that practice is SUFFICIENT (the second part - if you do the training, you will achieve the level).  This is crucial to this debate - those advocating for 10,000 hours are saying that it is both necessary and sufficient.

Gladwell reinforces this when he goes on to quote someone called Daniel Levitin:

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything…no-one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time” – Daniel Levitin, quoted in Outliers (emphasis added)

That all of the above are claims are enormous oversimplifications and without evidence becomes clear when you consider "what the science is actually saying", to borrow Syed's words from the clip above.

10,000 hours: Unnecessary and/or insufficient

So we start looking for evidence to test Levitin's (and others') statements about 10,000 hours being both necessary and sufficient.  We do this by disproving it, and begin with chess.  Gobet and Campitelli studied 104 chess players and measured practice time and performance level, and looked at the time taken to reach the Master level.  This is their finding:

So, the average time taken is 11,053 hours.  That's pretty much in agreement with Ericsson's violin players.  So far so good.  But look at that Standard Deviation - 5,538 hours, and it gives a co-efficient of variation of 50%.  For those not into the statistics, what this basically shows is a "spread" of the values around the average.  If the Standard Deviation is small, and the CV is low, then you have a tight cluster - all the individuals are close to the average.  But when it's 50%, then you know you have massive differences within that group.

And that's what happens when you start looking at individuals - one player reaches master level on 3,000 hours, another takes almost 24,000 hours, and some are still practicing but not succeeding.  That's a 21,000 hour difference, which is two entire practice lifetimes according to the model of practice.  It seems pretty clear that practice, while important, is not sufficient for some.  And for others, it's not even necessary.

But let's look at other sports.  Darts has been studied, by Duffy and Ericsson.  They find the following when looking at darts scores and accumulated practice time:

The figure above shows how much of performance can be explained by deliberate practice. In chess, which I showed above, it's 34%.  In darts, 15 years of practice explains only 28% of the variation in performance between individuals!  An extra-ordinary finding, because with all due respect, that's in darts...what else is there that influences performance?  Yet practice time accounts for only a quarter of the performance differences.

What is most interesting about this is that 10 years of practice explained 25% of variability, while 15 years explains 28%.  So clearly, the more you practice, the more you can explain performance.  That's not surprising, but the question is this:  How many hours of practice would it take to explain "most" of performance as a result of practice?  Look at the quote in the figure above, where Ericsson writes that "the development of expert performance will be primarily constrained by individuals' engagement in deliberate practice" (Ericsson, 2009).  Well, 28% is not "primarily constrained" and even though more practice explains more of performance, there is clearly a lot missing from this practice argument.

Sports examples: Very rarely do elite athletes need 10,000 hours

So far, we've looked at chess and darts, both skill sports, but neither is "physiologically-limiting" in the way that running, cycling or swimming may be.  So let's expand our examples and look at other sports.

Start with Olympic wrestling, football and field hockey.  Below are the findings from research on the USA Olympic athletes.

Clearly, 10,000 hours are rarely required. A subsequent study on Australian athletes found that 28% had participated for fewer than four years in their sport - that's probably 3,000 to 4,000 hours, at most.  One netball player from Australia had made the international stage on 600 hours of play.

Accelerated Talent ID and talent transfer

Australian skeleton is another interesting example - in 2002, they decided to adopt a systematic, accelerated talent ID approach to skeleton, and looked at sprinters, lifesavers and speed-skaters to find an Olympic skeleton athlete (Bullock et al, 2009).  It took fourteen months and they had qualified athletes for the Olympic Games, despite no ice-experience, and despite the prevailing wisdom that you "have to learn a feel for the ice" through years of practice to become elite.

Similarly, in the UK, they have had amazing success with accelerated talent ID and talent transfer, producing world champions within years of first introduction to a sport.

And I must emphasize this point - if the 10,000 hour concept is true, and it really does require that this time be accumulated (that is, if 10,000 hours is necessary), then talent transfer would be impossible, as would accelerated performance trajectories that we've seen in Australia and the UK.  And if genetics played only a small part, as some have argued, then Talent ID would also be wasteful and unnecessary, because any aspirant athlete would succeed, regardless of genetic "potential", providing they did the required training time.  This is clearly not true - the actions of federations who invest in Talent ID suggest that despite their talk, they don't believe this anyway.  But more on this tomorrow...

One important point is that different sports will have different requirements, different capacities for talent transfer and accelerated performance, and thus training time.  Rowing, cycling, and canoeing are perhaps easier to learn later in life than skill-heavy sports.  I dare say that tennis, golf may require much earlier exposure and training time - the skill component forces this.  Similarly, sports like football or rugby may also require early exposure, because the tactical insights and understanding are crucial to success.

However, even here, it's possible to identify who will go on to become a professional within the very first years of playing the sport - the Gronigen talent studies have shown this, where at the age of 14, children can already be picked as future professionals because they develop skills, improve endurance and learn tactics faster than their peers.  Differences in how quickly athletes improve, even in skill sports, suggests innate attributes that are predictive for success.


Greatness is recognizable early, long before 10,000 hours are accumulated: Michael Phelps and Missy Franklin


Having mentioned the fact that skill sport success can often be predicted very early, long before a player has accumulated 10,000 hours, it's worth looking at the examples of two swimmers at this point in the debate.  Michael Phelps is the owner of more Olympic golds than any person in history, and his story reveals that greatness can be recognized very early on.  He has told this story and described how he started serious training at the age of 11, doing approximately 1,000 hours per year.

At the age of 15, he was finishing fifth at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.  At 19 he wins 6 golds, and then 8 golds four years after that in Beijing 2008.  But the key is that first Olympic performance, fifth at the age of 15, after only 4 years of training.  Some will argue that the difference between Phelps in 2000 and Phelps 2008 is eight years of training.  I'd say you are partly right, but to me, the bigger issue is physical development - a fifteen year old boy finishing fifth in the wold, no matter how physically developed, is clearly marked for great things very early on in their career, long before 10,000 hours are accumulated.

Missy Franklin is equally telling.  At 16, she won 3 gold medals (and five medals in total) in swimming in Shanghai recently.  And she failed to even qualify for the US Olympic Trials at 13, only three years before.  So her rise has been, to put it mildly, meteoric, and her arrival as a the best of the elites, precedes 10,000 hours by a long way.

My question to advocates of a "genes are less important model, it's about training" is how does this athlete become a world champion at 16 and with relatively little training, whereas thousands and thousands of others, who train maybe more than she does and over a longer period, will never even make the USA team for swimming?  In fact, the question should always be turned around - don't ask why some succeed, rather ask why most fail?  For every example of a champion, there are thousands who get the same training, the same opportunity, but fail to even make national level, let alone become a world champion.  Why?  The answer to this question, and the question of why the likes of Missy Franklin succeed, is genetics and INNATE TALENT.  As mentioned, more on this next time.

Innate ability as a catalyst for training: The alternative theory

Finally, let's go back to the violin study and let me suggest a possible alternative theory for why the best expert performers tend to train more.  

Ericsson concludes that these children just accumulate more training time and that this explains performance.  The difference between the "best experts" and the "least accomplished players" is the training time.

But what if it is exactly the other way around?  Let's take two children at nine years old.  Do they have the same ability to play on first exposure?  Ericsson's model says yes, and that the difference comes later, when one child practices more, gets better teaching.  But what if the difference is present from the very first note, the first exposure to the activity?  The parents of a child who shows some ability encourage further practice, they invest in teaching and training, and this child, by virtue of the fact that he/she has more ability to begin with, accumulates more practice.  

But the child who has little innate ability makes the violin sound like the death march of stray cats, and their parents do not encourage more play.  In fact, they discourage it - the "go play outside" syndrome takes over, and the child is never exposed to teaching or practice.  His trajectory is set precisely because he has less innate ability.

My point is that the above graph can be explained just as easily using an innate ability argument as it can a deliberate practice argument.  The current explanation is been practice, but given what we know about genes, I'd argue that the 're-inforced' behaviour catalyst/filter explanation is just as likely.  Those who display greater ability early on (innate ability, that is) are encouraged to practice more, and they set out on that journey towards "best expert" levels, the yellow line, from the beginning.  Those who lack innate ability are placed on the blue line.  No amount of training will change this, but the behaviour is set early so we never find this out.  The result is that ability is determined by practice, on average, but that practice volumes are perhaps themselves influenced by innate ability.  

Until someone shows that individual differences in performance can be made to disappear with training, and that the differences we measure in performance are not present from the outset, I remain skeptical about an extremist view of performance being due to one factor.

The importance of practice: Practice is vital, but extremist arguments just don't work

Now, I don't mean to be dismissive of the importance of training.  Of course, practice is vital.  It is a pre-requisite for success, especially when you have a competitive sport where many are vying for the same medal.  In that situation, the person who succeeds must train hard.  But their ability to get more out of training, to adapt to training and also to start off from a higher "baseline" is just as important, and those are factors influenced by genes, as I'll cover in the next post on this topic.

To argue that it's about the training, and to dismiss that genetics play a significant role, is to adopt an untenable and grossly oversimplified position.  The 10,000 hour concept is a nice motivational tool, a way to encourage more training, to inspire people to improve.  The idea for elite performance is that the right person hears this and believes, and then does the training.  But to attribute success to 10,000 hours of training is not only over-simplified, it's wrong.  Matthew Syed, in the clip above, says that one will argue that you "need both talent and opportunity, but that's not what the science is saying".

The truth is, the science is saying exactly that.  Make no mistake - producing champions is incredibly complex.  The success of Kenya at distance running, or of Jamaica in sprinting, cannot be reduced to one, or even a few factors.  You will find altitude in many places.  You will find socio-economic similarities all over the world.  But you won't find champions.

Success is probably due to hundreds of different factors, all interacting with one another.  But the end result is that if you take 100 aspirant athletes in Kenya, and 100 aspirant athletes in the USA, and expose them to the same training, you will not see anything like the same success rate.  And that is due to genetic differences that are too complex to discover with the approach that has been adopted so far.

In this post, I've looked at the training and practice factor, and hopefully given a broader view on it than the terribly simplified version that 10,000 hours is what it takes.  Next time, the genes, and the very certain finding that genetics is vital, both in determining innate ability, and our response to training, and even our motivation or desire to exercise and train in the first place.

Ross

Specialization, training volume and talent development

Specialization, training volume and talent development

Yesterday I started what I hope is an interesting and thought-provoking series that addresses the issue of how we view and manage the process of sports talent development in young children.  I looked at a recent study of Danish elite and near-elite athletes where the authors concluded that "There is no delay in the athletic development that cannot be made up later with late specialization". 

Practice trajectory leads to performance?

That conclusion was inspired largely by their finding that elite athletes did LESS training than near-elite athletes up to the age of about 15, and then increased training time between 15 and 21.  The near-elite group, on the other hand, trained substantially more when very young, but peaked between 12 and 15, before actually dropping off.  The graph below, which I redrew using the data from the research study, shows what I called the "practice trajectory", and sums up the argument pretty nicely by showing how practice time (in hours per week) changes in the two groups

So there is a clear difference in practice trajectory, and it's tempting to say that this is linked to a difference in performance trajectory (in that they end at different levels).  However, that may not necessarily be the case, as I'll discuss below.

So today, I want to give my thoughts on the above graph, and give some possible reasons why the graph looks like it does.  I believe these potential solutions have some pretty significant implications for how we view "talent" and "hard work", and whether champions are born or made - it's unlikely to be as simple as we think!

Not specialization but training time

First, however, I have to clear up the definition of specialization and suggest a new name for the Danish study, which made a conclusion that I don't believe is supported by their data.  That study was called Late specialization: the key to success in centimeters, grams, or seconds (cgs) sports.

In my opinion, what the data suggest is that the paper should have been called "Delaying high training volume: the key to success in cgs sports.  That's because they actually found NO DIFFERENCE between elites and near-elites with respects to the training time spent on other sports - the elites did 63 months, the near-elites 62 months.

So the conclusion that delayed specialization predicts success doesn't hold up - it has little to do with specialization and a lot to do with training volume. This is important, because it's quite conceivable that a 12-year old who plays three sports (and is thus diversified) spends MORE time doing his main sport (for example, tennis) than another 12-year old who only plays tennis. Who is more specialized then? 

So, for the rest of this discussion, I'm going to leave "specialization" behind and talk rather about what the data showed, and that is that delaying higher training volumes in the selected sports predicts eventual placement in the elite group.  We need to discuss why that might be, because there are a few possible explanations.

Individual cases vs general principles

The other very important point to make is that all the data is an average (in this case, of 99 elite and 75 near-elite athletes) and within that data set, there'll be large variations.  So within the elite group represented by the beige line in the above graph, you may well have an individual who was doing 12 hours a week of training at 12, and you may also have near-elites doing less.  So we forge ahead with a discussion recognizing that we generalize, but also realizing that the question is that if you took 100 children, what would you recommend in order to maximize the chances of producing best possible performances?

Two models to explain the practice trajectory

With that, let's look at two models that might explain the practice trajectory.  To spare you scrolling up and down, here is the graph again:

 
I'd say there are three interesting questions about the changes over time in the two groups, which I've highlighted.

1. Why do some children do more training from the age of 9 to 15?
2. What happens in that period from 15 to 18, where there is a clear change in what the elite athletes do compared to those who will go on to become near-elite?
3. Why do the elite athletes continue to maintain training volume while the near-elites decline further from 18 to 21?

At the end of this post, I'll come back to these three questions and summarize my answers.  So if you feel like a "short-cut", jump to the bottom and get the quick version!  For the rest, to see the arguments, read on.

The motivation vs talent model

Generally speaking, I would propose that there are two "models" that could answer all three questions at once.  There's a hybrid of the two somewhere in the middle, of course, but I'll present the extremes in the interest of clarity.  The two extremes are summarized below.

I don't have the definitive answer of which model BEST explains what was observed, but I will say upfront that I believe the answer to be a combination, but I'm leaning more towards the talent model, on the right, and I'll explain why below.

The motivational/psychological model, and the role of parents and coaches

This model holds that young children who do high training volumes early will reach a point of burnout as a result of disillusionment with the sport, and a loss of desire which is amplified by a desire to try new things.

Normally (but not always) the high training volumes early will be the result of over-enthusiastic parents, who do not necessarily intend to be this way, but who create pressure for a child to train and perform in the sport from very young.  This may take the form of overt instructions ("you will train") or more subtle cues which steer a compliant child down a focus that they might not have chosen themselves (this balance, incidentally, is enormously tricky, and it would be presumptuous of me to give advice on it, so I won't...).  There are without doubt parents who adopt the more driven approach (again, think Woods and Agassi), and it's a problem here in SA, as I imagine it is wherever in the world you read this.

Competition becomes the focus, the parent's desire to win is transposed onto a child very early, and the relative importance of success is amplified.  A coach then comes on board, perhaps with the same desire to achieve success (for the team, school or club) and this further amplifies the pressure for the young athlete.

One comment from Michael on yesterday's post put this best when he described these as "stage parents", who "are the motivator behind the child's progress.  The child is a compliant learner combined with some motivation but not much...As much as the parents provided the impetus to get [the athlete] to near-elite [levels], they are not self-driven to make it into elites" (courtesy Michael on yesterday's post, thanks!)

The consequence of all this is that at some point, the athlete turns away from the time required to train, perhaps finding other sports or stopping altogether.  This explains point 2 and point 3 on the diagram above.  I received an email from a well known SA champion runner yesterday echoing these thoughts, that the child may never have truly enjoyed the sport, but did it as a result of EXTERNAL motivation (normally parents, but also peers and coaches), which was not sustainable.  It is certainly possible, as the examples some young athletes show us, but it's the general explanation for why there may be such a high attrition rate in those who train high volumes at young ages.

On the other hand, the elite athletes are those who are self-motivated, who have intrinsic desire to train, and this is motivation that normally develops later in life.  These athletes sample sports when younger, play more and compete less, and restrain the degree of "structure" in their sport until later.  Hence, training volumes are lower initially (1), increase later when the child makes the decision to commit and train hard (2) and maintains it as they achieve success (3).  The parent, meanwhile, is probably active, but facilitate the child's motivation, allowing them to develop at their own pace (again, thanks to Michael for the description!).

In this regard, the psychology, or the loss of motivation, is the main driver for what is eventually seen as a physiological change - the athlete trains less, achieves relatively poorer results and thus seems, physiologically, to have worsened.  So psychology drives behaviour (to train or not to train), which in turn drives the physiology (and performance).

The talent-physiology model

In contrast, the talent-physiology model says the exact opposite, that the physiology drives the psychology and the resultant behaviour.  Performance is thus the ultimate consequence of physiology, not motivation.

So according to this model:

• Some children do train harder when very young - this may be due to parental influence as described previously, or it may be because the child enjoys the sport at a young age (between 9 and 15, that is - you can go younger, but then there are other issues I won't go into here).  Whether it is parental or self-motivation does not matter too much at this stage
• The children who train LESS at this age, and who the data suggest will go on to be elite athletes, are not necessarily the ones who are more "balanced" or diversified, but rather the ones who have a better aptitude for sport in general and thus don't NEED TO TRAIN as hard in a specific sport in order to achieve their goals at these young ages.  They often get drawn into many other sports, precisely because of some innate ability, and the result is less training in what will ultimately become their selected sport
• In other words, their natural talent allows less training time per sport, and perhaps more 'play', whereas other children train more in a specific sport
• An additional and absolutely crucial factor is physical maturity relative to chronological age.  Call it biological maturity, but there is no doubt that children develop very differently, and so the differences between two 15 year olds may be very large.  This has performance implications, because now you have another possibility explaining training differences up to 15 years of age, also linked to physiology:
• Children who are early developers achieve more success at younger ages.  The faster, taller, stronger child at 14 is almost always dominant against their peers.  This encourages further training, both because parents encourage success and because children aged 14 or 15 recognize the value of success and so train more (as an aside, in SA, this is a particular problem, because a 14 year old who has developed early is big, fast and strong, and can easily be the school "hero" because of their rugby ability.  It doesn't do much for later developers, and nor does this early developer need to learn skills.  Later in life, when this advantage is eroded, he's left a little 'naked' and shown up for a lack of skill.  That's the theory, anyway...)
• Children who are late developers remain out of competition, may train less per sport but develop skills during this time
  
  
•  However, at around 15 or 16, these biological "gaps" start to narrow.  Late developers start to catch up, independent of training and perhaps at this stage, the 'end-result' begins to take shape.  The athletes who achieved success early on (thanks largely to early biological development) now find that their advantage is slowly being eroded.  
• Meanwhile, the athletes who possess some genetic advantage (to use a "swear word" to those who advocate the hard-work principle for success) for the sport, such as body size, metabolic adaptations, muscular differences begin to emerge as the best athletes
• The fact that this 'transition' in training volume happens at the age of around 15 to 17 is a very strong factor suggesting that training time may be linked to physiological development

 The ceiling comes into view

In other words, what is happening is that somewhere between the ages of 15 and 18, the "ceiling" comes into view.  You may recall yesterday that I wrote that genetics likely determines the ceiling in performance.  Training helps the athlete get there.  It's only at around 17 or 18 that it becomes more and more apparent to the athlete (and their coach and parents) that they have what it takes to succeed, or that they don't quite have it.

They may be good, and have achieved up to that point, but "great" lies beyond their capacity.  As a result, their training volume declines (2).  A loss of motivation?  Absolutely, but it's not the way the previous model defines it - here, the loss of motivation is simply because the athlete has recognized that there may not be a future in the sport.  They love it, and still do it (which is why they still train), but why do 2 hours a day to finish 20th?

At this point, the training history is irrelevant.  Those who trained less when younger did so either because they had more natural ability and so trained less or for more sport, or because they developed later and remained out of competition.  It doesn't matter, because the decision from 18 onwards is made by a athlete who is responding to their performance ability.  That accounts for Point 3 in the graph above.

Also, it's at this age that competition becomes fiercer, and so in order to remain competitive, an athlete must respond by increasing training volume, regardless of innate ability.   Their natural talent takes them to that point with less training than their peers, and at the age of 16 or 17, when most children have matured physically, they can begin to see that they have a future in the sport and must increase training volume.

Take a hypothetical case - a 15 year old rower, great as a junior because he is physically mature for his age.  But by 16, his peers are catching him as they mature.  They've been training less, but now their physiological development closes the gap on him.  Then he starts to lose, not badly, but enough that he realizes that he doesn't have what it takes.  At this point, his motivation levels decline and he trains less, the gap between him and those later developers getting larger and larger.  They have the added bonus that they have more "talent" to begin with, and pretty soon, you have this separation into the elite and near elite groups.

I think this is a crucial part of the answer - the children who train more younger probably do so partly because of parental pressure, but also because of success early on.  They do what they love, but they love it because they're good at it!  However, at some point, for various reasons, the status changes,  and the later developers, who trained less early, start to excel and then choose to train more to find further success.  So now you have a double-effect - not only do the most talented kids train more as they get older, but the less talented ones drop out and train less as they realize the ceiling is lower than initially thought.

Ultimately, in this model, it's the genetics, not the motivation, that "lets them down", because they've reached their "ceiling", which is set physiologically!  In this regard, the psychology is actually "pre-ordained" by the physiology.

Differentiating between the models - impossible, but intriguing

So which is it?  As I said upfront, I'm sure it's both.  In fact, there is evidence of reduced intrinsic motivation, and higher dropout rates, in athletes who specialize early with highly structured training.  And there are without doubt young athletes who stop training because they lose motivation and become disillusioned.  However, that doesn't control for the possibility that it's the physiology that actually determines the change in motivation over time, as I've suggested above.

And so if I have to pick an extreme, at least given the data of the Danish paper and my own insights and experiences, I'd go with the Talent-Physiology model to explain the changes in training and ultimate performance levels reached in elite athletes.

Why?  A few reasons.  First the training times in the Danish study up to the age of 15 are not really that high - an hour a day.  It's difficult to see that producing burnout, because it's actually rather low.  Three hours a day, that's another story.  So a "burnout" argument doesn't convince me.  

Secondly, and more importantly, the decision to back off and train less happens too early for it to simply be burnout from training and loss of motivation and disillusionment.  That would happen later, in my opinion, perhaps at school leaving age.  I do think that motivation levels may decline, but the main reason I would propose for a loss of motivation in someone at that age is that they stop being as successful, and decide that the investment (training time) is not worth the return (coming third or fourth or tenth)

And third, I don't think that a loss of motivation solely due to too much structured training could account for such severe reductions in training time in athletes who are still succeeding (and these athletes are).  I can think of very few athletes who retired from the sport while winning, and who did not return to it at some later stage.  I can think of many athletes who were burned out only once they started to lose - not winning is a very powerful force that strips away motivation!  So to see those changes at that young age (younger than 18), it would surprise me if it was a loss of intrinsic motivation as a result of too much structured training.  As a result of losing (the talent-physiology model), yes, but not simply because too much practice was bad for them earlier on.

Conclusion

So, three questions, and my three suggested explanations.  Again, let me emphasize this as strongly as I can - both models are plausible.  People lose motivation, and there's evidence showing reduced intrinsic motivation.  But that alone is not the driver of behaviour and less training, as I've argued.  Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, it's just that I would ascribe more cases to a talent-physiology model.

So here is the summary for those who jumped ahead!

1. Why do some children do more training from the age of 9 to 15?
   
   They are either pushed by parents into training, or they choose to train in response to success in a given sport.  That success might be driven by early physical development.  Meanwhile, some children train and compete less because they're late developers, or because they simply don't need the same training volume in order to compete.
   
   
2. What happens in that period from 15 to 18, where there is a clear change in what the elite athletes do compared to those who will go on to become near-elite?
   
   The ceiling comes into view.  That ceiling is determined by the genes, and some teenagers have an innate ability for a particular sport that tells them that they can "make it".  Some cannot, and they drop off in training volume, going on to become near-elites, or finding new sports altogether.  If you simply measured "intrinsic motivation" at this stage, you'd find that some teenagers have lost it, but this is not because practice is harmful, but because they aren't as successful anymore - a 16 year old is pretty savvy at picking this up!
   
   The fact those who did less training when younger go on to do more training now suggests that they may be developing physically to the point where they are now competitive and successful, or that they had superior ability to begin with and now respond to higher levels of competition by training more
   
   
3. Why do the elite athletes continue to maintain training volume while the near-elites decline further from 18 to 21?
   
   They respond to success - they recognize that the ceiling is high, and the fact that they're now in a much more competitive environment necessitates more training.  But that is worth it, because they have the capacity to succeed at the very high level.  Their behaviour (more training) is the consequence of physiology.

Obviously, there will be debate to this point.  It contradicts what I perceive to be a general culture of saying to people that they can do whatever they wish to do, provided they train hard enough.  Log the hours, you'll earn the reward.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that sport works this way, particularly the cgs sports, because they are what I would call physiologically affected sports.  All sports are physiologically affected, of course, but these are particularly determined by physiology.  I think that the example of sprint athletes is the best I can think of to illustrate that speed is not as trainable as people sometimes suggest.

For skill based sports, maybe a different debate.  What's missing in this debate (and I'm aware of this) are some illustrations and examples of how elite athletes do progress - how do top sprinters move through childhood into adulthood?  What was Usain Bolt's rise to the top, and is it typical?  Can we find any evidence for innate vs 'earned' sporting ability, especially in these cgs sports? (Because I guarantee that there are no longitudinal studies of it!)

But that's for next time, when I'll look at 10,000 hours, and the theory of training creating expertise. 

As always, this is meant as the first word in a discussion not the last, so feel free to comment!

Ross

Early vs Late Specialization: When should children specialize in sport?

Early vs Late Specialization: When should children specialize in sport?

There is no single pathway to success in sport.  If there were, we wouldn't be able to compare the stories of Chrissie Wellington, who discovered her remarkable talent late in life but went on to dominate IronMan Triathlon within a few years, to that of another endurance athlete, say Floyd Landis, who began cycling at school, with a single minded focus that took him to the professional level many years later.

There are countless cases of both examples, not only in endurance sport, but in skill-based sports - cricket or rugby players who "arrive" in their 20s, compared to the "prodigies" who are ear-marked for success from their early teenage years, or even earlier.  I am sure that in your own country, you can instantly think of one example of each.

If it took starting at the age of 4, with a parent driving a child to train for hours a day (think Agassi, Woods), then we wouldn't have cases like Roger Federer, who showed exceptional tennis ability very young, but did play other sports (on this note, Federer is reported to have begun at 6, but played football and tennis until he focused on tennis at 12 - this is still young, as we'll see later, but it's not nearly as early as other cases of tennis players.  Compare Agassi, who spent hours a day practicing at 6 years old, and who even played a match for money at the age of 9, at his father's "request")

But is there an optimal time to begin specialization in a particular sport?  This is such a loaded question that I can't possibly answer it, or even begin to cover it in one post.  So with that question begins a series of articles where I'll look at some of the evidence for whether young athletes who specialize very early on are more or less likely to succeed than athletes who delay high training volumes, competition and specialization in sport.

Without wanting to be too prescriptive, I think the following sub-headings needs to be addressed in a series:

1. What do elite athletes do?  Is there evidence to say whether early or late specialization is better?
   
2. What does science (that is, me...!) make of the 10,000 hour concept that that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an 'expert'? 
   
   Really, what this gets at is whether there is such a thing as "talent" or whether hard work and practice allows anyone to succeed.  It's the Coyle, Syed and Gladwell argument in Talent Code, Bounce and Outliers.  But what does physiology make of it?
   
3. What is the concept of Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD)?  Where are its strengths, and where are its shortcomings, both practically and physiologically?
   
4. What are the implications of all this for coaches, parents, and young athletes?

So with that in mind, let's get started towards trying to answer that question.

Early and Late specialization:  Introducing the concepts

So we begin by looking at some evidence for what elite athletes do, and for that, I'll focus on a specific research paper called Late specialization: the key to success in centimeters, grams, or seconds (cgs) sports. (I linked to this paper on our Twitter feed on Monday, and I'll do a similar "article of the week" every Monday, so if you haven't yet followed us on Twitter, you can do so now!)

The title of the paper kind of gives away its conclusion, but don't worry, there is a lot more to it, including my conclusion that the paper does NOT in fact make this discovery, and there's something much more complex going on.

Here is a systematic breakdown of the paper, looking at the main research question, the rationale behind the research, its findings and how they might be interpreted.

The research question and rationale

The paper aimed to sort out which of two models for developing elite athletes was most effective in producing elite performances.  Those two models are summarized in the diagram below.  But before we begin, we have to define specialization.  In the paper, it has a rather clumsy definition, where it's a hybrid of being defined as a focus on a specific sport, as well as being measured in hours of practice in that sport.

In many cases, specialization and training volume will be related - the more you focus/specialize, the more time you have for that sport.  For example, a 15-year old with 2 hours a day to train will train more for Sport A if they are specialized than if they split the 2 hours between Sport A and Sport B.  However, this is not always the case - the same 15-year old can be "diversified" and do both sports, but still do more training in each than the specialist if they sum their time - A + B might equal four hours a day, not necessarily two.

To me, specialization should be measured as the number of hours spent training for Sport A relative to the time spent practicing for Sports B, C and D.  Someone who only practices tennis for one hour a day is more specialized than someone who trains tennis for two hours, but also plays football for an hour a day.  In the literature, however, there seems to be confusion around this, and specialization is not only "single focus", but also training time.  In other words, it's "specialization plus time practicing", and in the paper, I feel this is confused, and impacts on the conclusion.  Bear this in mind, because it will come up later...

So on your left is this model of "early specialization", where an early focus on a sport is recommended.  This is motivated largely by the framework that it takes so many practice hours to become proficient, and so you have to start young, and focus young, in order to accumulate them.  This is the Ericsson argument, and if you've read Bounce or Outliers, you'll know of Ericsson - he did a study on violinists in Berlin and found that the outstanding violinists had practiced for almost 10,000 hours, compared to only 8,000 hours for the "good" and 4,000 hours for the "normal" violinists (the ability of the violinists was assessed by the professors and teachers, in case you were wondering).

That study led to this 10,000 hours concept, which has since been applied to all kinds of skills, including sport.  There is an inherent problem with this, because sport is not the same as playing a violin in that there are without doubt physical attributes that training cannot change but which determine one's "ceiling of ability" in most sports.

The most obvious (bordering on ridiculously, in fact) example is that if you stand 1.50m tall, you'll never be a basketball star, even if you accumulate 20,000 hours of practice.  Your genetic make-up eliminates some of your options, it determines your ceiling especially when physiological characteristics are so significant to success, and then training helps to optimize how close you get to reaching your ceiling.  That's why no one succeeds without some training, but without question, some have more "talent" for a specific sport than others....  Whether the same is true of a skill-sport like tennis is debatable.  This is a great topic, but not one for today - that's why I'll set it aside for a future post as part of this series.  Let's leave this as saying that this kind of thinking drives the early specialization model.

On the negative side, there is also evidence of higher attrition rates with early specialization, and also potential negative health outcomes.  The issue is whether a young athlete who specializes at 9 or 10 is likely to continue with the sport beyond say 18, and there is some evidence that the answer is no.

On the right, the contrasting model is Early Diversification.  Here, children play a number of sports, the theory being that they develop a diverse range of skills, which are transferred across sports.  The proposed upside is that it promotes intrinsic motivation (let the child choose for themselves) and balance through increased exposure, and also ensures longevity.  The downside is that it may be too late, and by the time the person reaches adulthood, they may never overcome a potential late focus on training for a specific sport.

The only way to differentiate is to ask the question of elites, and that's exactly what the study did.

The method and findings

This kind of study is usually done by looking backwards in what is called a retrospective design.  Athletes are given questionnaires asking them to recall how much time they spent training each year.  Your alarm bells might be ringing, and rightly so, because this is a fundamental problem of this kind of research - it's reliant on memory and we all know that this is not infallible - can you remember how many hours a week you spent training in 2003?  The authors of the paper acknowledge this and they use some methods to confirm the memory of the athletes they interview, and conclude that the recall is reasonably good, given the limitation.  What will really help is a 20-year prospective longitudinal study, which I'm sure is on the way at some stage in the future.

The athletes interviewed in the study were high-level Danish athletes who were split into two groups, Elite and Near-Elite.  Elite athletes were those who had achieved Top 10 placings in World and Olympic competition or podium finish in European competitions, which is pretty impressive.  I'm looking at repeating this study here in South Africa, and if we set the standard at Top 10 globally, we'd be lucky to get 20 athletes!  The Danish got 148.  In the Near-Elite group were 95 athletes who hadn't met those criteria, but who were still on the Danish sports programme.

The athletes were then given a questionnaire looking mainly at how many hours a week they practiced, from the age of 9 up to the age of 21.  They also had to report what other sports they did and when they reached certain "milestones" in the sport, such as first international competitions, when they began intense training and when they reached the elite level.

The other very important thing to point out is that they only sampled athletes in what are called CGS sports - these are the sports measured in Centimeters, Grams and Seconds.  Think Rowing, swimming, athletics, kayaking, weightlifting, sailing, triathlon, cycling.  This is vital, because this study is NOT going to allow us to answer whether a tennis player or a golfer should start younger.  It also looks at sports that are typically more favoured by later specialization, because in general, peak performance age in these sports is in the mid to late 20s.  Sports like diving and gymnastics, on the other hand, are characterized by a peak in the late teens, early 20s, and that's a significant point to make.

Below is a summary of the main findings regarding cumulative training time, with a short explanation beneath it (it's fairly self-explanatory)

So four major findings.

• The first is that the Near-Elite group had actually gotten an earlier start than those who would go on to be elite - by the age of 9, they're 160 hours of practice time AHEAD.  
• That difference persists up to the age of 18, by which time there is no difference between the Elite and Near-Elite athletes.  
• Then, at the age of 21, the Elite athletes have pulled well clear, with about 1,100 hours MORE training than the Near-elites at that age.  
• And finally, there was no difference in the number of months spent on other sports - 63 months for the elites, 62 for the Near-Elites.  In other words, during the 12 year period of sampling, both groups spent just over 5 years in total practicing in other sports.  What is not reported is how those sports were spread out - were they done predominantly from 12 to 15, were they done for 7 months a year or all at once?

The practice trajectory:  When should the training volume be ramped up?

The above table (and the main table of results in the paper) are however incomplete.  What is really of interest is to track the practice time per year in these athletes.  For some reason that wasn't presented in the paper, but it's easy enough to do given the results, and so below is my re-analysis of their data, looking at what I would call a "practice trajectory":

So this plots the average number of practice hours PER week over time in the two groups.  Elites are shown in the beige, the Near-Elites in blue.  Quite clearly, they follow different trajectories.

• Up to the age of 9, as we said, the athletes who will go on to be Near-Elites do more than twice as much practice - it's an artificially low number, of course, because there's probably zero training up to maybe 5 or 6 on average, but it had to start somewhere!
• From 9 to 12, Near-elites do 2 hours a week more than athletes who will go on to be Elite
• From 12 to 15, Near-elites remain ahead, and the result is that by 15, they'd accumulated about 850 hours more practice than the Elite group had done
• Then from 15 to 18, it changes.  Here, the Near-Elites began to practice less, while the Elite group continued, increasing to almost 2 hours a day on average.  That shift is what causes the cumulative practice time at 18 to be equal between the groups, as we showed in the previous figure
• From 18 to 21, more of the same - the Elite group continues to spend 14 hours a week in practice, while the athletes who will go on to be Near-Elite drop down to just under 7 hours a week

So quite clearly, they follow very different pathways, and end up in different locations - one group goes on to be in the Top 10 globally or Top 3 in Europe, the other doesn't quite make that level.  They may yet, of course, the study was simply a retrospective look of a sample.

The authors then made five major conclusions. 

1. Elite athletes specialize later in their career.
2. Near-elite athletes pass through “milestones” sooner than elite athletes (I didn't go into this data, but the summary is that the athletes who go on to be Near-elite begin sport younger, train hard sooner and enter international competition around 2 years earlier than athletes going on to be Elite)
3. Elite athletes enter international competition older (as for above)
4. There is no difference in the time spent on other sports (remember, 62 months vs 63 months over the recall period)
5. "There is no delay in the athletic development that cannot be made up later with late specialization"

Some arguable conclusions, and what the study REALLY shows

Read that last conclusion again, for it is perhaps the most important one in the paper:  "There is no delay in the athletic development that cannot be made up later with late specialization".  I actually disagree subtly with this conclusion.

To me, the primary finding of the study is that success and performance in these CGS sports is NOT determined by how much TIME is spent training as a child, and that increasing the training volume later (after 15) is more than able to make up for time NOT spent training when even younger.   

As for the issue of specialization, that's a conclusion not supported by the results!  The time spent on other sports was the same - it may have followed a different pattern, but this wasn't reported.  All we know is that both groups did around 62 - 63 months of training in other sports over this period.  Specialization, defined as a single-focus on a sport, has nothing to do with ultimate performance, then.  It's more about time spent at different ages, and that "practice trajectory" I showed in the above graph.

However, in the interests of your time, and mine, I'm going to leave it overnight, and pick up this discussion again. Let's just say that this study was much more focused on training time in the final chosen sport, and it makes quite a nice case for delaying high training volumes until the mid to late teenage years.  Effectively, you need to replace "specialization" with "high training volumes" and then you have the real finding of the study!

And that's where the discussion will resume tomorrow!  That, and also we'll look at some of the reasons why that graph of practice time would look like it does - it may not be what you think!

I'm sure there will be comments and feedback, and as always, it's most welcome!  Join us tomorrow for more on this paper, and the issue of specialization vs training volume.

Ross