To minimize differences between individuals, imagine comparing the same fully grown but completely novice athlete on the first day they ever try a sport, to 10 years later when they are competing for the gold medal or equivalent (assume they have appropriate genetics and coaching to excel). How much performance increase can training make? Is it 50% more, 3X as much, or just 5-10% more?
I imagine it varies a lot by sport; probably pure strength events perhaps a doubling or tripling of capacity, but in other sports it’s probably a lot less; in HS I had a friend who with no actual training was within about 15% of the word record 100m sprint time.
For more simplicity restrict it to events where mastery of complex technique/equipment/strategy are less important than pure physical output. There must be a lot of training logs and data out there, but has anyone looked at the question?
Googling says an ordinary adult male can run 100m in around 15 seconds. Usain Bolt did it in 9.58 seconds. What number do you get when you plug in those times?
Yes I’m well aware of the importance of technique in all events; which is why I specified events where it is less important as part of the overall performance. I was reminded of that by the current ski-jumping thread, where it appears technique/timing/how the jumper holds their body during the jump accounts for most of the success or failure.
In some sports simply learning how to do the technique massively improves your performance, so it’s harder to separate out the physical improvements gained through training. I wouldn’t even know how to pole vault, but I (and any other human) can run in a straight line.
So in the given example, if Bolt’s very first 100m sprint time was 15 seconds, and years later his world record time is 9.58, he reduced his time by 5.42 seconds (~36%), or from another perspective he increased his speed by 57% (15 / 9.58). Yes a fraction of that increase is due to improving his initial launch technique and how his coach taught him to swing his arms, but it’s a small fraction.
Contrast that to the deadlift: a quick Googling suggests the untrained man can deadlift about their own body weight, while the world record hovers around 900-1,000 pounds. So, assume that untrained WR holder started as a very large but healthy man who weighed (and could initially deadlift) 300lbs. He’d have improved by 300% or more.
Whoops on my very last calculation; it’s not 300%, it’s 200%. Rrrrgh:
15 / 9.58 = 1.565…subtract the 1 and you’re left with 0.565 or 56.5% increase.
900 / 300 = 3…substract the 1 and you’re left with 2.0 or 200% increase.
Road cycling time trials fit that description pretty well. Unlike mass-start road races or mountain biking, there is not much skill involved, it’s principally about steady cardiovascular output. For a flat 1 hour time trial, a healthy and reasonably fit beginner can maintain about 20mph, a decent trained amateur 25mph, a professional 30mph.
How much of that is because the person has no idea of how to deadlift and some training? Could I, who doesn’t know how to do a deadlift were to learn, in a month or so could I be up to 500 pounds or would I still be at 350?
I would think that at least some training would gain some quick results. I know in swimming someone who hasn’t had any lessons would be sloooooow, but just a couple of lessons in they could improve quite a bit.
While there are definitely do’s and don’ts in a deadlift technique, it’s overall pretty simple and you can learn them in a 5-minute video. The improvements with steady training and adherence to that simple technique seem to come pretty fast, but the same is true for most weight-lifts. And it seems to be mostly simple muscle growth and improved body mechanics where you intuitively learn how to coordinate various parts of your body after doing to movement x hundred times.
A straight comparison of times, distances, weights, etc. doesn’t look all that helpful, especially across different activities.
More useful in gauging improvement would be looking at where you rank in the range of human performance for your chosen event. If you go from 50th percentile to 40th, that’s a significant improvement. (But maybe not as big as going from 5th to the 4th.)
What’s a novice and what’s a top level athlete anyway? I mean, are we using “novice” to mean untrained, or are we meaning maybe gifted amateur?
I mean, Olympic shotputters in the world are putting a 16 lb shot somewhere between about 68 and 76 feet, while good high schoolers are doing 55-65 with a 12 lb shot. And a total novice adult man is probably only going to put a 16 lb shot 20-30 feet at MOST.
Most top professional athletes began at the junior level. Their performances there are what catapulted them to higher and higher levels of the sport.
Many were in the top percentile of their age-groups and levels. Understandable, since only the best from any age/group get taken forward.
I can only think of a few who improved relatively as they got to higher levels. Jamie Vardy in soccer was released from a youth contract but made it into the Premiership and the English national side.
In cricket. Marcus Trescothick was a middling player at lower levels, but dominated at the highest.
This is one problem I had envisioned; that there is a huge range of human ability and the differences in low and high range of “average” is probably larger than the actual change an individual can achieve in their own ability. Someone like Usain Bolt is going to be faster than most humans on the planet even without training.
That’s why I was thinking more of how much an individual can improve their own performance from novice to professional, rather than ranking them against other people. Comparing one’s self to everyone else is problematic because there is no clear “starting line” from which everyone is initially evaluated.
So. lets say “novice” is 22 year-old you, and “top level” is 27 year-old you after your county’s leader chose to give you a fully-funded 5-year athletic training program with top coaches (or make it 10 years, or whatever). You need to perform a strength, a speed, and an endurance event. Which one would you likely improve at most and least?
That’s going to heavily depend on one’s personal build, biochemistry, genetics, etc… People have different builds, different ratios of slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscles, different inherent capabilities with coordination, lung capacity, balance, etc…
Someone like a Michael Phelps essentially won the genetic lottery for competitive swimming, and then built on that with world-class training and nutrition. Same with Usain Bolt. Meanwhile there are probably hundreds of swimmers out there with as much or more drive as Phelps or Bolt, but who just weren’t gifted with the right genetics, and that’s why they’re either losing to them in the races, or not even world-class.
I mean, no matter how hard a friend of mine tries and trains, he’s not going to be a competitive shotputter, because he’s fundamentally a skinny, short guy. Shotputters are generally pretty tall and big.
And the thing is, I suspect that the people who win that genetic lottery have a larger span between novice and world-class than “normal” people- otherwise how would they end up so absolutely dominant?
There are tons of sites that show average performances broken down by age and experience. From one :
I suspect that they don’t list complete beginners because of the wide range of fitness levels. Having beginner as 30 days of participation at least means that the individuals have a basic level of fitness.
Because all the top athletes wind up in the roughly the same range, then the margin of improvement is directly related to their basic level of fitness before they start.
(too long personal anecdote)
Just by chance, I was just looking at this last week. My dragon boat team just changed our training by converting one of our gym days into a running day and we started with 5k.
Last Thursday was our first run. While some members didn’t finish, others of us actually had better times than the novice category (six months of training). I would guess that most beginner runners at this age don’t have our same level of fitness. My time was 30 minutes and someone at my age without any previous exercise may be 45 minutes or longer on their first day, if they even finish.
Looking at a random Couch to 5k site, they have Week One as
They plan on nine weeks, so what day would you consider as Day One?
One of our members could only run for several hundred meters when she first joined last year. She still can’t run 5k but she will eventually. Obviously she’s going to have a much higher margin of improvement, even if she never gets to be a top athlete.
OTOH, I would guess that most top athletes are not going to start as couch potatoes.
Usain Bolt may not be an ideal example, as he was primarily a 200/400m runner in school and is of course better known for the 100 after going pro. But we can look at his best 200 times over the years.
I coach junior athletes (8-16 years old). I always say that if I get a 9-12 year-old who has never been shown how to do shot put or discus correctly, I can add about 2 metres on their shotput and 4-5 metres on a discus in the first lesson - because the basic technique is not ‘common sense’. That can be 20-30%.
After that it gets a bit harder. Everyone knows how to run, jump and throw - it’s how to do it well that’s difficult.
It shows every all-time top performance in every event. It gives you a rough idea of the range between top athletes - and the range of their performances. For example, there gave only been about 250 javelin throws within 10% of the world record - but over 2000 within 5% of ther 100m world record.
You can learn how you should deadlift in five minutes. Apply real, progressive resistance, and you’ll spend a long time actually doing it right. There’s way more than some do’s and don’ts in deadlifting, as in, a number of fine-tuned technique tweaks that up your numbers substantially without any muscle gains. Again, the challenge comes from the big-ass weight you are moving while trying to keep not just proper but optimal form from start to finish.
I’ve been a sports coach, and been around some world-class practitioners in a couple of (very) niche activities. My experience is that elite performers distinguish themselves from the “really good” by:
Solid, highly dependable consistency on tasks that even the “really good” would find challenging
Occasionally going above and beyond
Doing 1 and 2 while being observed, and appearing to make it look easy
Watch elite volleyball players receiving serves. They can consistently pass / bump hard, accurate jump serves to a setter with great precision. That’s really hard. I used to be a very good volleyball player, specialized in passing / setting and have played against some high level adversaries. When I watch elite players receive serves I am always amazed at how consistently, and seemingly effortlessly, they can do it.
Even the least skilled major league baseball players are, in fact, highly skilled. I once stood behind the cage and watched major leaguers take batting practice (whole story there). I saw Daryl Strawberry put ball after ball out of the park, but what really impressed me was the platooning, light-hitting second baseman. He hit every ball with perfect contact, perfect timing and complete confidence. Obviously a different experience than watching a college or minor leaguer take practice swings.
I think this holds true for just about any sport. Or even most jobs that have a technical or performance component. I fly airplanes for a living, and I think the difference between my colleagues and a Sunday Cessna pilot is some knowledge and experience, but mostly consistent performance of actions lesser skilled pilots would find challenging and intimidating.
I agree with this. I saw it at junior high school. We had one kid in my year who went on to become part of the Australia soccer team. He was just a different breed to everyone else on the soccer field. That’s when I gave up competitive sports. Sports since then is just for exercise and fun for me.
Even if someone’s not naturally gifted to the point where it’s possible for them to be a world or even national class athlete, there are still pretty large differences in body proportion, cardiovascular capability, and so forth.
To use the example of my short, skinny friend, he’s short and small. He doesn’t add muscle easily or quickly. Meanwhile, I’m taller, and I do (or at least used to when I was younger) put on muscle pretty easily. Neither of us is world-class athlete material though.
But if we wanted to be shotputters, I’m genetically much more well equipped for it with the height and muscle building ability. Similarly, he’s set up to be a distance runner far more than I am.