Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t win medals
Genetics and mental toughness key to building champions, research says
With the Olympics come and gone, let’s reflect on how much work it takes to become among the best in the world.
If you believe in the 10,000-hour rule — the premise that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master any skill and that less practice means less success — then it stands to reason all our Olympians have put in at least that much time perfecting their craft.
The 10,000-hour rule has tickled the fancy of researchers, who have published a number of studies testing it in different domains. A recent analysis by researchers reviewed more than 6,000 studies looking at the relationship between practice and performance in athletics.
The researchers, Brooke Macnamara, David Moreau and David Hambrick, note that sport is an ideal domain in which to test the 10,000-hour rule. Not only is success easily measured, there’s a wealth of data on sports perfor- mance. So they added up all the hours of practice in the athletes’ careers and correlated that number to their performance, including a broad sample of athletes from recreational to elite.
Also of interest to researchers was whether the same amount of practice was needed to succeed in team versus individual sports and whether sports like discus, where the athlete controls the speed and direction of a thrown object, responds better to practice than a sport like volleyball or basketball, where the athlete has no control over the pace or direction of the balls played.
Do sports that use a ball versus a projectile demand more practice?
And do sports like beach volleyball and rowing, which are subject to environmental variability — as compared to indoor volleyball or judo, where the environment surrounding the venue is more stable — require more or less practice to achieve success?
Finally, there are the individual variables in sport, like the age at which deliberate practice is started and whether the volume of practice is as strong a predictor of success among elite, sub-elite and recreational athletes.
With all these variables in mind, researchers narrowed the field to 34 studies and compiled the data.
Their conclusions agreed with previous statements that deliberate practice is important for success, but perhaps not as much as previously thought.
By their calculations, 18 per cent of athletic success can be attributed to practising. This level of influence held steady regardless of whether the athlete played a team or individual sport, played indoors or outdoors or used a ball or other sports equipment.
The only instance where the effect of practice was more significant was where the athlete controlled the speed of the projectile, be it a dart, discus or shot put.
The volume of exercise needed to achieve success varied considerably based on the skill level the sport required and the level of success attained, with some athletes putting in about 13,000 practice hours. The average level of practice by the athletes analyzed was 3,949 hours. Keep in mind, however, that the athletes ranged from recreational to Olympians.
As for those at the highest level of sport, data collected suggested practice had the least effect on performance, with only a one per cent effect between deliberate practice and performance, which suggests at the highest level of sport something more than practice is needed to win gold.
Perhaps the most interesting finding was that the age an athlete begins a sport had little bearing on their success.
“A major finding in our study was that higher-skill athletes did not tend to start their sport earlier in childhood than lower-skill athletes,” researchers wrote.
“Also, when comparing higherskill and lower-skill athletes, differences in starting ages were not associated with different amounts of accumulated deliberate practice. This finding is inconsistent with the argument that earlier starting ages in childhood are associated with higher levels of athletic achievement later on.”
So if practice only contributes to about one-fifth of an athlete’s success, what accounts for the other 80 per cent?
Genetics for sure, which play a role in aerobic and anaerobic power, aerobic endurance, the ability to build muscle and the type of build (muscular, tall, lean, short).
Additional factors related to athletic success include competitive experience and the various psychological aspects that fall under mental toughness and preparedness.