You Can’t Coach Speed… Right?
For young basketball players, an old coaching adage says “you can’t coach height”, while for sprinters, wide receivers or base stealers, it’s “you can’t coach speed.” In sports, there are certain physical traits that need to be included in an athlete’s raw, genetic ingredients. It’s much harder (though not impossible) to play in the NBA at 5’ 7” than at 6’ 7”. There’s being the fastest in the neighborhood and then there’s being the fastest in the world.
While a young athlete can become faster through training, the question is if there is an upper limit from deliberate practice over thousands of hours without innate physiological advantages. New research from Grand Valley State University claims that becoming world class fast by training alone is highly unlikely, based on the running histories of many champion sprinters.
Recently, discussion about genetics versus practice has dominated the literature as an “either-or” choice. Either you subscribe to the 10,000 hour theory that anyone can be anything, as long as they put in enough effortful practice, or that training can only take you so far without the right combination of inherited gifts. As with most athlete development questions, the answer is somewhere in between.
Yannis Pitsiladis, professor sport and exercise science at the University of Glasgow, has been trying to answer this more definitively for runners, both sprinters and distance. Because most of the world’s great runners have come from rather specific geographic areas, (sprinters from Jamaica, middle-distance from Kenya, marathoners from Ethiopia), he thought that there may be a common denominator, perhaps a speed gene, that these athletes shared. So, he began collecting DNA samples from these champions to analyze for similarities. So far, after thousands of saliva swabs, he has found nothing conclusive.
“We were so convinced by arguments that had been put forward by other scientists, by the media, that these populations like the Jamaicans have the right genes, that we thought it’d be easy enough to just go to the island, collect DNA samples, analyze them, come up with those genes and there’s the end finding,” Pitsiladis told NPR. “Four to five years later, I can tell you that we have been looking at the genes and, in one line, I have to say that we have found no genetic evidence for the phenomenon that we’re observing in Jamaica.”
However, Michael Lombardo, professor of biology, and Robert Deaner, associate professor of psychology at Grand Valley State, pursued the view that talent matters. Looking for clues that training significantly contributed to success, they studied the biographies of 26 world class sprinters, including 15 Olympic sprint gold medalists and 8 of the fastest men in U.S. history.
In every case, the bios indicated that the future stars were exceptionally fast even before their formal training began. In fact, most of the sprinters gained world class status in less than five years after training started, as opposed to the 10-year guideline often quoted.
The researchers also interviewed 64 NCAA sprinters and throwers (shot put, discus, javelin) who had qualified for the 2012 Outdoor Track and Field Championships. The athletes recalled that their initial race times as high school freshmen, at the start of their formal training, were better than 95-99% of their peers.
“We expected that most sprint champions’ biographies would indicate that they were always the fastest kid in their neighborhood, even before they did any formal training or received any coaching,” said Lombardo. “But the consistency of the pattern was surprising — from Helen Stephens, a 1936 Olympian, to Usain Bolt, there were no exceptions. Gathering the data systematically allowed us to see how strong the patterns were. It also allowed us to test and rule out alternative explanations.”
Their research has been published in the journal PeerJ.
Both scientists hope these new findings will help put the talent versus training discussion in proper balance.
“Our point is not that talent trumps everything,” said Lombardo. “Training is crucial, especially the kinds of training highlighted by the deliberate practice model. But in sports, innate talent is required too.”
So, sometimes the best advantage for a young athlete is to choose their parents carefully. While some genetic deficits can be overcome with sufficient training, speed seems to require an innate head start.
“Our results won’t come as a surprise to most biologists, sports scientists, or coaches — all of the previous data pointed to this conclusion,” said Deaner. “But our results are important because the deliberate practice model and its ’10-year rule’ remains enormously popular among many social scientists and intellectuals. Our results are clear-cut and should require no scientific training to understand. So we hope they will finally put an end to the debate.”
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Kevin Schultz
Associate Director of Strength & Conditioning
Director of Olympic Strength & Conditioning
University of Wisconsin
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