A Tale of Two High Jumpers
(Or: 10,000 Hours Plus or Minus 10,000 Hours)
On June 27, 2009, his thirtieth birthday, Dan McLaughlin resolved to do something special: quit his job as a commercial photographer in Portland, Oregon, and become a professional golfer. His golf experience over the previous three decades consisted of two childhood trips to a driving range with his older brother. Save for some youth tennis and a season of cross-country running in high school, McLaughlin hadn’t been a competitive athlete. But something had to change.
After completing his journalism degree at the University of Georgia in 2003, he took pictures for newspapers for two years, and then worked in various forms of advertising and product photography. After six years at a desk job that centered on snapping photos of dental equipment, McLaughlin needed a venture more suited to his taste for challenge.
At first, he thought it might be grad school. So he saved enough money to start an MBA program in finance. But it took only the first day’s class at Portland State, on how to operate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, for McLaughlin to realize that an MBA was not the change of course he craved. He mulled over becoming a physician’s assistant, or an architect, but decided that the new path had to be drastic.
McLaughlin had always had a bit of the extreme in him. His idea of a winter vacation in 2006 was a trip to Fiji during the nation’s military coup. And yet, in many ways, McLaughlin is the Everyman. He’s 5'9", 150 pounds, and “not particularly physically gifted,” in his own words. “I’m kind of just a very average-type person,” he says. That’s what he’s counting on.
McLaughlin was inspired by what he read of Ericsson’s work in the bestsellers Talent Is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, and Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. He read about the 10,000-hours rule, the “magic number of greatness,” as it is called in Outliers, and about the idea that skills that appear to be predicated on innate gifts are often nothing more than the manifestations of thousands of hours of practice.
And so it was that on April 5, 2010, McLaughlin logged his first two hours of deliberate practice toward his ultimate goal of going pro and making the PGA Tour. His plan is to log every single hour along the path to 10,000, and to show that “there’s no difference between experts and me, or other people, not just in golf, but in any field. If I were over six feet tall, that might not speak to most people, but I’m a normal guy.”
McLaughlin is not approaching his journey—he had logged 3,685 hours by the end of 2012—as a publicity stunt, but as a scientific experiment. He enlisted a PGA-certified instructor and consults with Ericsson for advice on his strategy. McLaughlin is committed to counting only those hours of practice that truly qualify as deliberate according to Ericsson’s definition.
“According to the tenets of deliberate practice, you have to be cognitively engaged,” McLaughlin explains. Just going to the driving range and swatting balls for a few hours without an eye toward improvement and error correction doesn’t cut it. So, six days a week, McLaughlin puts in six hours of deliberate practice, a workday that consumes eight hours because he takes frequent breaks to think about what he did well and what can be improved—like closing the club face on impact—and because it is exhausting to maintain strict focus for hours on end.
McLaughlin is building his golf game from the ground up. When I first spoke with him, 1,776 hours into his journey, he had yet to wield a driver. “I’m only up to an eight-iron,” he said, “so my game is all within 140 yards of the hole.” On the occasions when McLaughlin decides to play something resembling a round with his eight-iron, he places three balls at varying distances from the cup and plays all three at once. “That way,” he says, “I can get twenty-seven holes of play in on only nine holes.” At his current pace, McLaughlin will reach 10,000 hours late in 2016. (And he isn’t even counting the hours he spends lifting weights, reading golf theory, or working with a nutritionist.) McLaughlin fully expects to be a professional when he reaches the magic number. “There are no guarantees,” he says. “I could get in a car wreck and die tomorrow. But my ultimate goal is to make the PGA Tour.”
“No matter what happens,” he continues, “I will consider it a success. I love the game more every day, and I gave a presentation at a conference at Florida State, where I had breakfast, lunch, and dinner with Dr. Ericsson. . . . He said this is useful for him to see how things progress, even though it’s just one person. He said he’s never done this long a study on someone, tracking their deliberate practice.”
No one has ever done such a study. All of the data in support of the 10,000-hours rule have been what scientists call “cross-sectional” and “retrospective.” That is, the researchers look at subjects who have already attained a certain skill level and ask them to reconstruct their history of practice hours. In the case of the original 10,000-hours study, the subjects were musicians who had already gained admission to a world-famous academy, so most of humanity had long since been screened out. A study that is restricted to only prescreened performers is hopelessly biased against discovering evidence of innate talent. A “longitudinal” study, on the other hand, is a much higher standard of experimentation that follows subjects as they accumulate those hours in order to watch how their skills progress. It’s easy to understand why longitudinal research of the 10,000-hours rule is difficult: imagine the challenge of recruiting a group of Dan McLaughlins for a study—all willing to spend years practicing a skill they’ve never tried—much less tracking them assiduously.
There is, however, a way to track the acquisition of skill expertise without at least some of the problems of subjective human recall.
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Chess players are rated according to Elo points, named for Arpad Elo, a physicist who created the ranking system. An average chess player has around 1,200 Elo points. A master, the bare minimum level to make a living playing chess, has between 2,200 and 2,400 points. An international master has 2,400 to 2,500, and a grandmaster has more than 2,500 Elo points. Because Elo points are accumulated as a player improves, the rating system provides an objective accounting of a player’s historical skill progression.
In 2007, psychologists Guillermo Campitelli, of the Universidad Abierta Interamericana in Buenos Aires, and Fernand Gobet, director of the Centre for the Study of Expertise at Brunel University in West London, recruited 104 competitive chess players of varying skill levels for a study of chess expertise. Campitelli had coached future grandmasters, and Gobet, who logged eight to ten hours a day of chess practice in his youth, had been an international master and the second-ranked player in Switzerland.
Campitelli and Gobet found that 10,000 hours was not far off in terms of the amount of practice required to attain master status, or 2,200 Elo points, and to make it as a pro. The average time to master level in the study was actually about 11,000 hours—11,053 hours to be exact—so more than in Ericsson’s violin study. More informative than the average number of practice hours required to attain master status, however, was the range of hours.
One player in the study reached master level in just 3,000 hours of practice, while another player needed 23,000 hours. If one year generally equates to 1,000 hours of deliberate practice, then that’s a difference of two decades of practice to reach the same plane of expertise. “That was the most striking part of our results,” Gobet says. “That basically some people need to practice eight times more to reach the same level as someone else. And some people do that and still have not reached the same level.”* Several players in the study who started early in childhood had logged more than 25,000 hours of chess practice and study and had yet to achieve basic master status.
While the average time to master level was 11,000 hours, one man’s 3,000-hours rule was another man’s 25,000-and-counting-hours rule. The renowned 10,000-hours violin study only reports the average number of hours of practice. It does not report the range of hours required for the attainment of expertise, so it is impossible to tell whether any individual in the study actually became an elite violinist in 10,000 hours, or whether that was just an average of disparate individual differences.
On a panel at the 2012 American College of Sports Medicine conference, Ericsson noted that the now world-famous data were collected in a small number of subjects and are not entirely reliable in terms of counting practice hours. “Obviously, we were only collecting data on ten individuals,” Ericsson said. “And [the violinists did] some of the retrospective estimates several times, and there was no perfect agreement.” That is, the violinists were inconsistent in multiple accounts of how much they had practiced. Even so, Ericsson said, the variation among just the ten most elite violinists—the 10,000-hours group—was still “certainly more than 500 hours.” (Ericsson himself, it should be noted, never used the term “10,000-hours rule.” In a 2012 paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, he ascribed the phrase’s popularity to a chapter title in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which, he wrote, “misconstrued” the conclusions of the violin study.)
When I asked Dan McLaughlin whether he had any concern that he might, like some of the chess players, be a 20,000-hours guy as opposed to a 10,000-hours guy, he said that he considered the journey a victory in itself. “When it comes down to D-Day and it’s my ten-thousandth hour,” McLaughlin said, “it’ll be interesting to see whether I’m still shooting seventy-five, or I missed Q-School [the PGA Tour’s qualifying school] by one stroke, or if I’m on the Tour. I think you could probably master something in anywhere from 7,000 to 40,000 hours, but this is kind of a good way to keep track of progress.” Somehow, the 7,000-to-40,000-hours rule just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
For the chess players, differences in progress showed up right away. “If you look at those players who go on to be masters and those who remain below that level,” Gobet says, “some of them have the same practice the first three years, but there were already large differences in performance. Perhaps if there are very small individual differences [in talent] at the beginning, they make a huge effect. We assume it takes about ten seconds to learn a chunk, and we have estimated that it takes about 300,000 chunks to become a grandmaster. If one person learns each chunk in nine seconds and the other person eleven seconds, those small differences are going to be amplified.”
It’s a sort of butterfly effect of expertise. If two practitioners start with slightly different initial conditions, according to Gobet, it can lead to dramatically different outcomes, or at least to drastically different amounts of practice that will be required for similar outcomes.
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On the morning of August 22, 2004, Stefan Holm was staying calm the way he always did before a competition, by losing himself in a book. This time, it was Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Games by Michael Llewellyn Smith. When Holm, a Swedish high jumper, traveled for competitions, he liked to choose books that were relevant to the locale he was visiting. And this book was particularly apropos, as he would be competing in the Olympiakó Stádio in Athens in a few hours in the 2004 Olympic final.
As always, Holm made sure that he forced every omen into auspicious alignment. Even if he wanted to stop reading his book at page 225, he would make sure to read to at least page 240, because when the bar was raised to 225 centimeters (7'5") during the competition, he did not want that number associated with stopping in his mind.
In order to avoid the mental strain of small decisions, Holm’s morning followed a practiced pattern: first, corn flakes and orange juice for breakfast; then, one hour before leaving for the track, he laid the blue and yellow competition clothes bearing the symbol of the Swedish crown on the bed, followed by a shower, shampoo—always twice, for no reason he could explain—and a shave. He packed his bag in the same order every time. He wore the same black underwear he always did for competition. He put the right sock on before the left, and his jumping shoes in the reverse order, the left before the right.
At the track that evening, Holm’s life came down to one final attempt at 7'8". He missed on his first two jumps. A third miss would be the end. As he did before every jump, he whisked his hands backward over his shorn hair, twice, wiped his eyes, tugged the chest of his jersey, and then cleared the sweat from his brow. He took a few baby steps toward the bar, and then broke into a full sprint. He launched himself into the air, and sailed right over. After that, he cleared 7'9" to win the Olympic gold medal. It was a fitting climax to a story that began with the kind of youthful obsession that is capable of producing genius.
Inspired by the Moscow Olympics, Holm took his first jumps with his neighbor Magnus over the sofa when he was just four years old, in 1980, an adventure that ended when Magnus broke his arm. But the duo was undeterred.
When Holm was six, Magnus’s father built a high jump pit for the boys from pillows and an old mattress and placed it in the backyard. Two years later, in 1984, when Holm was eight, he saw a competition featuring Patrik Sjöberg, the brash Swedish jumper with the cascading golden tresses who would go on to set the world record. All across Sweden, hordes of mini-Sjöbergs began scissor-kicking and Fosbury-flopping over their parents’ couches. The young Holm often beckoned his father’s attention with delighted squeals of “Look! I’m Patrik Sjöberg!” before bounding over the couch.
Holm started school around that time, an endeavor that excited him primarily because the school had a high-jump pit. He spent many a lunch hour, with Magnus, enacting a fantasy version of the Olympic high-jump competition, occasionally showing up tardy for class.
On the day of the Athens final, Magnus was there in the stands, and so was Johnny Holm, Stefan’s father and lifelong coach. In his youth, Johnny Holm had been a catlike goalkeeper in Sweden’s fourth division, and could have progressed toward the professional ranks, but he chose to stay close to home and to his job as a welder. From the time Stefan Holm was a teenager, he could sense from his father’s stories that Johnny regretted never having taken the chance to become a professional athlete. His father did not say it outright, but Holm could tell from how eager Johnny was to help his son throw himself fully into high jump. Both Holm and his father became obsessed with the sport.
In 1987, as if sent by the jumping gods to aid Stefan Holm in his quest, a professional-grade indoor track-and-field facility called Våxnäshallen opened in western Sweden, just a few minutes’ drive from his tiny hometown of Forshaga. It gave Holm, at the age of eleven, what would become his year-round, career-long, world-class training venue.
At fourteen, Holm cleared six feet, an age-group record in his area in the west of Sweden, though he was defeated at a handful of competitions that season. At fifteen, he won the Swedish youth championships and traveled with his father to Gothenburg to meet Patrik Sjöberg’s coach, Viljo Nousiainen. The meeting sparked an enduring friendship between the elder Holm and Nousiainen, and Johnny Holm began to adapt some of Nousiainen’s training methods for his teenage son. The boy who had idolized the great Patrik Sjöberg was suddenly being groomed to become him. But there was an obvious difference. Sjöberg was 6'7", while every local newspaper article about Holm’s accomplishments noted his diminutive stature. As an adult, Holm would top out at 5'11", downright Lilliputian for a high jumper. In a sport that requires raising one’s center of mass as high as possible, starting with a high center of mass is an enormous advantage.
As a teenager, Holm developed the high jumper’s equivalent of stage fright: when the bar was raised to a height above his head, he would take his normal approach, but rather than jumping he simply ran under the bar and onto the landing mat. In several competitions in his teens, Holm did that three straight times at a given height, which meant he was out of the competition. Instead of giving up, Holm redoubled his work, quitting soccer and dedicating himself solely to high jump. At sixteen, he lost only a single competition—a wound he would remember and avenge with his undefeated 2004 season—and immersed himself in what he later called a “twenty-year love affair with the high jump.” (For much of those two decades, it was an exclusive love affair that left Holm little time for girlfriends.) As Holm himself acknowledges, it would be a fair bet that he has taken more high jumps than any human being who has ever lived.
By seventeen, Holm was good enough to face his hero Sjöberg in competition. Sjöberg won handily, but Holm wondered whether he could one day top the Swedish icon if he kept at it. At nineteen, Holm started a weight-lifting regimen—concentrated on his left leg, of course—that would get progressively more intense over a decade to the point where he could put 310 pounds, double his weight, on his shoulders and squat so low that his butt nearly grazed the ground, before popping back up.
To compensate for his stature, Holm perfected a sprinting approach where he hit a top speed around nineteen miles per hour, likely faster than any other jumper in the world. To accommodate that speed, he had to start taking off from farther and farther away from the bar. Holm was flying faster, farther, and higher every year, rocketing at the bar and curling his body around it so tightly that if his heels had a secret they could whisper it into his ear when he was in full arch. Starting in 1987, Holm improved a few centimeters every year, without fail. In a task that seems so “you either got it, or you don’t,” Holm was transforming himself into the ultimate “got it.”
In 1998, Holm won the first of eleven consecutive Swedish national championships. Three years later, he finished just off the Olympic medal stand, taking fourth in Sydney. That was not good enough.
Holm had been living at home and taking college classes on and off. At twenty-five, he dropped out of school and moved out of his parents’ house into an apartment that was just down the road from the Våxnäshallen facility, in Karlstad, a town of sixty thousand that sits on the north coast of the largest lake in Sweden. From then on, Holm trained twelve sessions per week. His workday started at ten A.M. with two hours of weights, box jumps, or hurdles—he and his father designed hurdles that could be raised to five and a half feet. Then a break for lunch, and another session in the late afternoon that might consist of thirty high jumps at full competition speed. Thirty, that is, if all went according to plan. Holm could not go home on a miss, nor would he lower the bar to facilitate a clearance, so practice went until he made it over whatever height he was confronting. By the time Athens rolled around, Johnny Holm had watched his son take so many jumps that he could tell whether Stefan would clear the bar when he was still four steps from liftoff.
Without a running start, Holm’s standing vertical jump hovered around twenty-eight inches, which is perfectly pedestrian for an athlete. But his blazing fast approach allowed him to slam down on his Achilles tendon, which would then act like a rebounding spring to propel him over the bar. When scientists examined Holm, they determined that his left Achilles tendon had hardened so much from his workout regimen that a force of 1.8 tons was needed to stretch it a single centimeter, about four times the stiffness of an average man’s Achilles, making it an unusually powerful launching mechanism.
In 2005, a year after he won the Olympic title, Holm earned a qualification of the perfect human projectile: he cleared 7'10.5", equaling the record for the highest high-jump differential between the bar and the jumper’s own height.
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Late in the day that I met him at the snow-covered train station in Karlstad, Holm took me to Våxnäshallen, the facility that “was my home for twenty years,” he said. On one side of the track, near a weight-lifting area, is a locked box that contains Holm’s custom-made hurdles. To save himself from himself, Holm has given away the key. He still visits to high jump once or twice a week, though, and his father trains young jumpers at the facility.
Holm’s son Melwin has begun to tag along. (Melwin is not a Swedish name. Holm and his wife liked “Melvin,” and Holm wanted “win” somewhere in the boy’s name.) One day in 2007, when Melwin was two and Johnny Holm was babysitting, Stefan returned home and found his infant son flopping backward in diapers over a high jump constructed of Lego Duplo bricks. “He cleared thirty centimeters,” Holm says, with a straight face.
At Våxnäshallen, a few kids approach Holm for autographs. (Since his athletic retirement, Holm has become famous for winning Swedish television quiz shows. He has a steel trap of a memory and can recall exact heights from competition jumps twenty years in the past.) For the most part, Holm is left alone to watch a group of seven- and eight-year-old children try high jumping. Some of the kids jump off the wrong foot. Others go off both feet. As the children flop onto the mat one by one, Holm points to those who have a feel for how their body should move in the air. Holm whispers to me, noting the children who he thinks have potential. When I ask whether he could teach any one of them to be an Olympic champion, he says: “There are some things you can’t teach, the sort of feel for jumping. I was never into training the technical things. The [back] arch was just always there.”
As we leave the facility and make our way back toward the train station, we pass a bookstore. “Come here,” Holm beckons, pointing through the window of the store at a white book bearing a hand that is painted blue and making a victory sign. As I press my face to the glass, I see that it’s the Swedish translation of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.
“You see this? Read this,” Holm says. “There were jumpers who beat me when I was young. You wouldn’t have said I would be Olympic champion. It’s all about your ten thousand hours.”
•
In 2007, Holm entered the World Championships in Osaka, Japan, as the favorite. And, despite the fact that there has never been a more assiduous student of high jump, Holm was faced with a competitor who he barely knew: Donald Thomas, a jumper from the Bahamas. Thomas had just begun high jumping. As Thomas’s cousin, a college track coach, put it, “He still doesn’t know that a track goes around in a circle.”
The previous year, on January 19, 2006, Thomas was sitting in the cafeteria at Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, Missouri, boasting about his slam-dunking prowess with a few guys from the track team. Carlos Mattis, Lindenwood’s top high jumper, had enough of Thomas’s lip and bet him that he could not clear 6'6" in a high jump competition.
Thomas decided to put his hops where his mouth was. He went home and grabbed a pair of sneakers and returned to the Lindenwood field house where a smirking Mattis had already set the bar at 6'6". Mattis stepped back and waited for the big talker to fall to earth. And Thomas did, but the bar did not come with him. To Mattis’s amazement, Thomas cleared it easily. So Mattis pushed the bar up to 6'8". Thomas cleared it. Seven feet. Without a semblance of graceful high-jump technique—Thomas hardly arched his back and his legs flailed in the air like the streamers trailing a kite—he cleared it.
Mattis rushed Thomas over to the office where head track coach Lane Lohr was organizing his roster for the upcoming Eastern Illinois University Mega Meet and told the coach that he had a seven-foot high jumper. “The coach said there’s no way I could do that. He didn’t believe it,” Thomas recalls. “But Carlos was like, ‘Yeah, he really did it.’ So he asked if I wanted to go to a track meet on Saturday.” Lohr picked up the phone and pleaded with the meet organizer to permit a late entry.
Two days later, in a black tank top and white Nike sneakers and shorts so baggy they blanketed the bar as he passed over it, Thomas cleared 6'8.25" on his first attempt, qualifying for the national championships. Then he cleared 7'0.25" for a new Lindenwood University record. And then, on the seventh high jump attempt of his life, with rigid form akin to a man riding an invisible deck chair backward through the air, Thomas cleared 7'3.25", a Lantz Indoor Fieldhouse record. That’s when Coach Lohr forced him to stop out of concern that he might hurt himself.
It would get better. Two months later, Thomas competed at the Commonwealth Games in Australia against some of the best professional jumpers in the world, wearing tennis shoes. He placed fourth in a world-class field, a result that actually confused him because he did not yet understand how tiebreakers work in high jump and thought that he was in third place until the results were announced.
Thomas’s cousin Henry Rolle was the hurdles coach at Auburn University, and Thomas was swiftly offered a scholarship to Auburn on the condition that he agree to commit to actually start training for the high jump in 2007. So he did. Sort of.
Auburn assistant coach Jerry Clayton had coached Charles Austin, the 1996 Olympic high jump champion, and saw right away that he needed to develop Thomas slowly. “When he first got here, he didn’t know how to warm up or stretch,” Clayton said. And then there was the issue of practice. Thomas would step out of practice at Auburn’s Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum under the guise of going for a drink of water, and forty minutes later Clayton would find him outside shooting baskets. In Thomas’s own words, he found high jump “kind of boring.”
With a few months of light training, Clayton lessened Thomas’s stutter-step, and though he couldn’t get Thomas to put on the high jump shoes that every other elite competitor wears, he at least got him into pole vault shoes. In his first full season, Thomas cleared 7'7.75" to win the NCAA indoor high jump championship.
In August 2007, with a total of eight months of legitimate high-jump training to his name, Thomas donned his pole vault shoes and the gold and aquamarine uniform of his native Bahamas and traveled to Osaka, Japan, for the World Championships. In non-Olympic years, the World Championships are the Super Bowl of track and field.
Thomas advanced easily to the final, as did Stefan Holm. When the men’s high jump finalists were introduced, broadcasters announced a laser-focused Holm as the favorite. Thomas, looking cool in sunglasses beneath the bright lights illuminating the stadium, was described as “very much an unknown quantity.”
Early in the competition, it appeared that Thomas would fold in his first world spotlight. While the rest of the jumpers took such lengthy approaches that they had to start on the running track, Thomas began on the infield, as if he were using the high jump equivalent of the short tees at a golf course. He stutter-stepped his way to a miss at 7'3"—each jumper gets three attempts at every height—lower than he jumped in that first meet at Eastern Illinois. Meanwhile, Holm was cruising, passing over 7'3", 7'5", 7'6.5", and 7'7.73" without a single miss, as his father watched through a video camera and pumped his fist in the stands.
But Thomas began to hit his form, managing to alternate makes and misses. He arrived at 7'8.5" along with a handful of other jumpers, including Holm.
For his first attempt, Holm stood with his eyes closed, envisioning himself floating over the bar. He approached, leapt, and barely grazed the bar. As it fell to the ground, he executed a frustrated backflip on the mat. Next, Yaroslav Rybakov, a 6'6" Russian, nudged the bar off the stand. Then came Thomas. He slowed down so drastically as he approached the bar that it seemed impossible that he could clear it. And yet, flailing his legs and with his back nearly straight, he passed 7'8.5" on his first attempt, putting his hand down behind him as if to break his fall because he was still uncomfortable with the sensation of falling backward. He rolled off the mat and gamboled across the track in celebration. But Holm was up again.
Another miss, just barely. Holm shook his palms in front of him as if beseeching the high jump gods. They didn’t listen. On his final attempt, Holm clipped the bar with the back of his legs and fell to the mat with his head in his palms.
The guy in pole vault shoes who thinks high jump is “kind of boring” was crowned the 2007 world champion. On his winning jump, Thomas had raised his center of mass to 8'2". Had he any semblance of the back arch that every other pro jumper does, he would have shattered the world record.
Holm was polite in his remarks afterward, congratulating the new champion. Rybakov called Thomas’s feat amazing, and noted that he himself had been practicing for an outdoor track-and-field world title for eighteen years and had yet to win one, compared with Thomas’s eight months. But Johnny Holm, Stefan’s coach and father, was so unnerved by Thomas’s win that in a postevent interview he called him a “jävla pajas,” literally “damn clown,” essentially the Swedish equivalent of “buffoon.” Johnny Holm said that Thomas’s “flutter kick style” was a scandal for high jump, and suggested that the inelegance of his jumping was an affront to the sport and the men who had spent years training.
In 2008, the Japanese television station NHK asked Masaki Ishikawa, then a scientist at the Neuromuscular Research Center at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, to examine Thomas. Ishikawa noted both Thomas’s long legs relative to his height, and also that he was gifted with a giant’s Achilles tendon. Whereas Holm’s Achilles was a more normal-sized, incredibly stiff spring, Thomas’s, at ten and a quarter inches, was uncharacteristically long for an athlete his height. The longer (and stiffer) the Achilles tendon, the more elastic energy it can store when compressed. All the better to rocket the owner into the air.
“The Achilles tendon is very important in jumping, and not just in humans,” says Gary Hunter, exercise physiologist at the University of Alabama–Birmingham, and an author of studies on Achilles tendon lengths. “For example, the tendon in the kangaroo that’s equivalent to our Achilles tendon is very, very long. That’s why they can bounce around more economically than they can walk.”
Hunter has found that a longer Achilles tendon allows an athlete to get more power from what’s called the “stretch shortening cycle,” basically the compression and subsequent decompression of the springlike tendon. The more power that is stored in the spring when it is compressed, the more you get when it’s released. (A typical example is a standing vertical jump, in which the jumper bends down quickly, shortening the tendons and muscles, before jumping skyward.) When Hunter put subjects on a leg-press machine and dropped weights down on them, the longer the person’s Achilles tendon the faster and harder he was able to fling the weights back in the opposite direction. “That’s not exactly the same as a jump,” Hunter says, “but it has a lot of similarities. And that’s why people jump higher when they have a drop step or a few steps: they use the velocity of descent toward the ground to compress the tendon, just like a spring.”
Tendon length is not significantly impacted by training, but rather is primarily a function of the distance between the calf muscle and heel bone, which are connected by the tendon. And while it appears that an individual can increase tendon stiffness by training, there is also growing evidence that stiffness is partly influenced by an individual’s versions of genes involved in making collagen, a protein in the body that builds ligaments and tendons.
Neither Ishikawa nor Hunter would suggest that the sole secret to the jumping success of Holm and Thomas is in their Achilles tendons. But the tendons are one puzzle piece that helps explain how two athletes could arrive at essentially the same place, one after a twenty-year love affair with his craft, and the other with less than a year of serious practice after stumbling into it on a friendly bet. Interestingly, Thomas has not improved one centimeter in the six years since he entered the professional circuit. Thomas debuted on top and has not progressed. He seems to contradict the deliberate practice framework in all directions.
In fact, in absolutely every single study of sports expertise, there is a tremendous range of hours of practice logged by athletes who reach the same level, and very rarely do elite performers log 10,000 hours of sport-specific practice prior to reaching the top competitive plane, often competing in a number of other sports—and acquiring a range of other athletic skills—before zeroing in on one. A study of ultraendurance triathletes found that the better athletes had practiced far more on average but that there was a tenfold difference in practice hours among athletes who performed similarly.
Studies of athletes have tended to find that the top competitors require far less than 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach elite status. According to the scientific literature, the average sport-specific practice hours to reach the international levels in basketball, field hockey, and wrestling are closer to 4,000, 4,000, and 6,000, respectively. In a sample of Australian women competing in netball (sort of like basketball but without dribbling or backboards), arguably the best player in the world at the time, Vicki Wilson, had compiled only 600 hours of practice when she made the national team. A study of athletes on Australia’s senior national teams found that 28 percent of them started their sport at an average age of seventeen, having previously tried on average three other sports, and debuted at the international level just four years later.
Even in this age of hyperspecialization in sports, some rare individuals become world-class athletes, and even world champions, in sports from running to rowing with less than a year or two of training. As with Gobet’s chess players, in all sports and skills, the only real rule is that there is a tremendous natural range.
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In 1908, Edward Thorndike, who would become known as the father of modern educational psychology, came up with a way to test whether nature or nurture dominated an individual’s ability at a task. Thorndike was a leading proponent of the then-controversial idea that older adults—meaning, at the time, those over thirty-five—can continue to learn new skills. He figured that the way to distinguish nature from nurture was to give people the same amount of practice at a certain task and to see whether they became more or less alike. If their skill levels converged, Thorndike reasoned, then the impact of practice was overwhelming any innate individual differences. If they diverged, then nature was overpowering nurture.
In one experiment, Thorndike had adults practice multiplying three-digit numbers by three-digit numbers in their heads as quickly as they could. He was astounded by their improvement. “The fact that these mature and competent minds improved in the course of so short a training so much,” Thorndike wrote, “is worthy of attention.” After one hundred practice trials, many of the subjects cut their mental computation time in half. And every single subject improved. Just as in chess, language, music, and baseball, as practitioners improve at mental multiplication, they internalize patterns and systems of breaking problems into pieces that allow for increasingly rapid calculation.
But while Thorndike saw across-the-board improvement, he also noted what sociologists often call a “Matthew effect.” The term derives from a passage in the biblical Gospel of Matthew:
For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
Thorndike saw that the subjects who did well at the start of the training also improved faster as the training progressed compared with the subjects who began more slowly. “As a matter of fact,” Thorndike wrote, “in this experiment the larger individual differences increase with equal training, showing a positive correlation with high initial ability with ability to profit by training.” The passage from the Bible doesn’t quite capture Thorndike’s results accurately because every subject improved, but the rich got relatively richer. Everyone learned, but the learning rates were consistently different.
When World War I erupted, Thorndike became a member of the Committee on Classification of Personnel, a group of psychologists commissioned by the U.S. Army to evaluate recruits. It was there that Thorndike rubbed off on a young man named David Wechsler, who had just finished his master’s degree in psychology. Wechsler, who would become a famous psychologist, developed a lifelong fascination with tracing the boundaries of humanity, from lower to upper limits.
In 1935, Wechsler compiled essentially all of the credible data in the world he could find on human measurements. He scoured measures of everything from vertical jump to the duration of pregnancies to the weight of the human liver and the speeds at which card punchers at a factory could punch their cards. He organized it all in the first edition of a book with the aptly momentous title The Range of Human Capacities.
Wechsler found that the ratio of the smallest to biggest, or best to worst, in just about any measure of humanity, from high jumping to hosiery looping, was between two to one and three to one. To Wechsler, the ratio appeared so consistent that he suggested it as a kind of universal rule of thumb.
Phillip Ackerman, a Georgia Tech psychologist and skill acquisition expert, is a sort of modern-day Wechsler, having combed the world’s skill-acquisition studies in an effort to determine whether practice makes equal, and his conclusion is that it depends on the task. In simple tasks, practice brings people closer together, but in complex ones, it often pulls them apart. Ackerman has designed computer simulations used to test air traffic controllers, and he says that people converge on a similar skill level with practice on the easy tasks—like clicking buttons to get planes to take off in order—but for the more complex simulations that are used for real-life controllers, “the individual differences go up,” he says, not down, with practice. In other words, there’s a Matthew effect on skill acquisition.
Even among simple motor skills, where practice decreases individual differences, it never drowns them entirely. “It’s true that doing more practice helps,” Ackerman says, “but there’s not a single study where variability between subjects disappears entirely.”
“If you go to the grocery store,” he continues, “you can look at the checkout clerk, who is using mostly perceptual motor skill. On average, the people who’ve been doing it for ten years will get through ten customers in the time the new people get across one. But the fastest person with ten years’ experience will still be about three times faster than the slowest person with ten years’ experience.”
Scientists who study skill performance attempt to account for “variance” between people. Variance is a statistical measure of how much individuals deviate from the average. In a sample of two runners, if one athlete completes the mile in four minutes and the other runs it in five minutes, then the average is four and a half minutes and the variance is half a minute. The question for scientists is: What accounts for that variance, practice, genes, or something else?
It is a critical inquiry. It is not enough for scientists to say that practice matters. That point is entirely uncontroversial. As Joe Baker, a sports psychologist at York University in Toronto, says, “There isn’t a single geneticist or physiologist who says hard work isn’t important. Nobody thinks Olympians are just jumping off the couch.”
Scientists must go beyond saying that practice matters and attempt the difficult task of determining exactly how much practice matters. By the strictest 10,000-hours thinking, accumulated practice should explain most or all of the variance in skill. But that never, ever happens. From swimmers and triathletes to piano players, studies report that the amount of variance accounted for by practice is generally between low and moderate.
In a study that K. Anders Ericsson himself coauthored of darts players, for example, only 28 percent of the variance in performance between players was accounted for after fifteen years of practice. At the rate of skill convergence documented in that study, a 10,000-years rule might be more likely than a 10,000-hours rule—if, that is, the players would ever reach the same level at all.
The data quite clearly support a view of skill—from chess and music to baseball and tennis—that is based on a paradigm not of “hardware not software,” but of both innate hardware and learned software.
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