Joseph Baker and Sean Horton
The Big Idea
Whether human development is a product of nature or nurture is one of the longest and most colourful debates in the history of ideas. More common today however is the growing belief that we evolve by way of the intertwining of both our biological and environmental influences. This review paper explores the impact of these interactions on human performance, and in particular, on acquiring and demonstrating sport expertise. The inherent complexity of interacting influences in the pursuit of sport expertise is precisely what makes the uncertain journey worth the effort. What we find in the process of discovering and facing these uncertainties is nothing less than ourselves.
Takeaways
- For sport coaches, the central takeaway is to be cautious about evaluating the potential for individual athlete expertise on a narrow foundation of mere talent.
- For the players, the central takeaway is to be cautious about believing that one’s eventual level of sport expertise depends exclusively on talent.
- One way to sort out the complexities of developing expertise in a sport is to understand that it is the blending of both innate gifts and environmental influences that will improve chances for success.
- The primary influences on acquiring and exhibiting expertise in sport are genetics, and both physical and mental training.
- The secondary influences arise from social and cultural differences, family support, and a variety of contextual factors such as how mature (old) a sport is, and the numbers of other competitors populating the sport.
- There are certain fairly predictable elements of achieving sport expertise, such as deliberate practice, training over time—most say for at least ten years, and a collection of positive development traits such as focus, intrinsic motivation, risk-taking, recovery from mistakes, and emotional stability.
- There is one more certainty: that in any athletic or coaching career the dynamics of the entire institution of sport in life are uncertainties that make the struggles worthwhile.
The Research
These authors suggest that the research literature includes two categories of influences on acquiring and maintaining sport expertise, what they call logically enough primary and secondaryinfluences. The primary influences have direct impact on developing elite sport skills. These athlete-generated elements include genetic factors, training factors, and psychological factors. The secondary influences come though other variables including social and cultural differences, and contextual elements.
Primary influences
Genetically speaking, and by way of two well-known genetic studies (HERITAGE and the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart), there is compelling evidence that many biological and psychological characteristics related to physical performance are largely handed down. These include such factors as aerobic capacity, resting blood pressure and heart rates, response to exercise, general intelligence, and some personality factors.
With regard to training, there is not much support for the idea of general motor ability, such as balance. Instead, it appears that skilled performance is specific to the task being performed. Nor do experts and non-experts differ much on such general abilities such as reaction time or visual acuity. Experts rely on such training strategies as visual cues on body position of their opponents, for example, to make necessary adjustments to their responses in competition. Consequently the research literature shows there is a strong relationship between quality and length of training and exceptional performance. That’s how the “10-year rule” came about. Although the original domain for this rule applicability was music, it also holds for such sports as swimming, middle distance and distance running, tennis, karate, figure skating, triathlon, field hockey, basketball, and netball. In other words, it takes about ten years of deliberate practice (including competition, video training, team practices, one-on-one coaching, and technique development) to acquire sporting excellence.
From the psychological side, it appears that different sports demand different psychological requirements. Proficiency in golf requires a different psychological make-up than in ice hockey. Even so, there still are some common mental characteristics associated with high levels of proficiency in any sport. It has become a given that any elite athlete needs to be highly motivated and primarily by intrinsic or mastery orientations as opposed to extrinsic or outcome orientations. Elite athletes must also be able to focus, to manage anxiety, to be self-confident, to have higher levels of risk-taking, to be competitive, and to rebound from their mistakes. There also needs to be low levels of detrimental characteristics such as failure to deal with distractions, to hold one’s temper and anger, or to choke in stressful situations.
Generally speaking then, it is the intertwining of these primary influences—some genetic and some environmental—that in combination with timing, choices, and chance all combine to create athletic advantage. But it is also the case that these primary influences are themselves influenced by secondary factors.
Secondary influences
Secondary influences include social and cultural factors, and contextual factors. For example, just think of the cultural differences with regard to sport social value. It is easy to see how Canada is historically associated with ice hockey or Kenya with running. In Canada the climate is particularly friendly to ice hockey, which in turn gives youngsters a major sport to play most of the year, who in turn feed the growth of hockey clubs, university teams, and professional players, who in turn can become heroes, who in turn attract wide fan bases. In America it was always baseball—which was who we were, and now it is football—which is who we have become.
Obviously instructional resources are a huge part of the influence on the growth of elite sports men and women. These resources include, for instance, the availability of smart and innovative coaches who carry on the traditions of certain sports in a particular region or country. Needed are coaches who can who can maximise practice time, successfully motivate players, analyse techniques, invent strategies, and communicate effectively with all whom cross their paths.
Another secondary influence is the level of family support for youth talent development. Parental involvement and leadership is essential to growing talent. Just think again of the
10-year rule. Parents who sign-on to this rule must be flexible enough to modify their roles as their children move through the levels of club sport, emotionally and financially. This is kind of a “parents serve too” when it comes to serving as family support for nurturing their young athletes.
Additionally, there are contextual factors to consider as secondary influences. If one sport is older than another, it generally takes longer to approach mastery of the older sport over the recently discovered sports. There is likely less training needed in the newer sports because fewer people have had a hand in developing the range of necessary versatilities, techniques, and expressions. Skill refinement is another consideration. It is easier to be good in the Ironman Triathlon World Championship (b. 1978), for example, than in the Boston Marathon (b.1896). In the over 100 year history of the Boston Marathon, training methods and athlete capabilities have consistently lowered the winning times. But to be an elite athlete quicker it might be better to train for the Triathlon since we haven’t been at it as long compared to the Boston run. Finally, there is the number of competitors in a sport that can influence the relative ease with which an athlete can achieve elite performance. With fewer competitors, it is easier to rise to the top; it is easier to be in the hunt for elite status with a pool of 1,000 compared to a pool of 10,000. And too, in some sports it is just harder to refine skill. One 2003 study, for example, reported it took much more time of sport-specific training to become really good in basketball than it does in netball.
The authors conclude with the warning that within a complex system as sport, achieving and manifesting sport expertise is an uncertain prospect. Small changes in the variables or the interactions between the variables can compromise the smooth transition to achieving success. Uncertainty is an ever-present companion in the search for excellence.
