| Here's another fairly thorough examination of the 10,000 hour idea: http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/08/talent-training-and-... Key points: 1. Ericsson only published averages. Nobody else has seen the raw data. He didn't even give standard deviation or error bars. 2. "Talented" people get more positive feedback and so practice more. 3. There are so many observable phenotypal inputs and as yet unobserved phenotypal inputs into sports performance that pinning it to a single variable (hours of deliberate practice) is nuts. My sport is Olympic weightlifting. Some people will never be Olympic champions, no matter how hard they train. Factors affecting performance include: * Height. * Relative anthropometry: long legs are worse than short legs. Long torsos are better than short torsos. Long arms are better for the snatch, worse for the clean and jerk. * Fast-twitch fibre / slow-twitch fibre ratios. * Tendon insertion geometry. * Muscle-belly / tendon ratio. * Pelvic geometry. * Soft tissue robustness. * Natural hormonal environment: ratios, natural circulating testosterone and DHT, amounts of SBHG. * Placement and density of testosterone receptors in muscle tissue. * Myostatin production. These are basic physiological qualities that cannot be changed by any amount of training. While the statistics show that lifters who start younger out-perform lifters who start later (because it's a high-skill sport and childhood neuroplasticity is much higher), the historically and currently dominant countries in weightlifting have gotten there by simply having much larger pools of candidates to find genetic outliers in. |