A colleague forwarded this article today. Hats off to Mr Sam Priestley for participating in the experiment.
Quote from the article (by a former Commonwealth TT champion):
It’s encouraging news (to most of us) that there is no secret ingredient that makes a person sporty, but the cynical couch-potato in me somehow refuses to believe this :). What do you think?
To sum up the article:
“Local man practiced something for a while, got better at it.”
News at 11?
Well first of all–ping pong? Seriously? That’s an easy sport. I don’t care if the court is small, the ball is small etc. It’s easy. I have seen people go from not able to play for shit to holding their own with really good players in less than a year. I worked at a place where people who had never played got good enough to be threats in the company tournament in about 6 months.
Second of all, he was trying to become a player in the top 250 in a year, and he didn’t make it.
Obviously practice is going to make you better, but some people have natural gifts that just make it easier. One example here, the teacher I took piano from, for many years, actually has many accomplished former students, some of whom are professionals, concert pianists, and instructors at Juilliard. Me, after 12 years, I can play a bit. I did practice, and I even had perfect pitch (which weirdly enough seemed to be kind of a handicap) but I never got good enough to even distinguish myself at her recitals. Sure, I could have practiced more, but the people who got really great were not practicing more, and they were great anyway. (Okay, some of them were practicing more. But not all of them.)
Sorry, that’s ridiculous.
Most people, no matter how hard, long, and correctly they trained, could never run a mile in under 5 minutes, let alone 4. Most people, no matter how long they were coached by Butch Harmon, could never break par on a decent golf course, let alone contend in even the weakest PGA tournament.
Practice and training are great. They will make you better than you were before. But unless you have the innate talent to run a 5-minute mile after just a few weeks of training, then you will never, ever, ever run a 4-minute mile. That’s something maybe one person in a thousand can do.
Of course talent alone won’t make you a champ; it takes a lot of hard work, too. But an average guy, working just as hard, won’t get the same results after ten years as a genetically gifted guy will get in ten weeks. That’s just the sad truth.
It’s mathematically impossible.
Say you have 64 folks who practice their absolute best and hardest at a sport. Then they enter an elimination tournament. 63 must lose and only one can win.
For anyone to win in a zero-sum contest, someone else must lose.
Far less than that, there’s only about 1200 (maybe more, haven’t looked in a while) men who have run under 4.
Practice and determination can only refine existing aptitudes. While almost anyone can learn to play a piano, it takes actual musical talent to become very good at it.
Talent can be wasted or unexpressed, and people can discover previously unknown talents when they begin to train for something new, but we can all only work to our natural potential.
I suspect that the conclusion to this debate will be the very shocking: “Practice matters a lot, but talent is also very important”.
I think this says more about the state of the journalism going on at the BBC these days than anything else.
Practice can take you to the limit of what your genetics will allow. Nothing can take you beyond that.
For example, the ratio of fast- vs. slow-twitch fibers in the muscles of your legs and hips is set at conception. If you have 92% slow-twitch fibers in your legs like Alberto Salazar does, there is no chance that you will win the gold medal in an Olympic sprint event if you trained until doomsday. Sumio Endo was a multi-world champion in judo. He was 5’7" and weighed 280. What do you think would be his chance in ballet?
No one gets anywhere without training, but no one gets to the top without inborn ability.
I am not particularly well-suited to either of my primary physical activities (weight lifting, and judo), but I made it to black belt (and even had some success competitively) thru sheer stubbornness. But I have trained with people who were actually good. There is no comparison.
I trained my grip pretty hard, and I have reasonably strong hands and wrists. It is one of the things you need in judo. But - there is an advanced series of instructional manuals in judo called the Ippon Masterclass series. In one of the volumes, called Grips, the author tells an anecdote about what the elite level is like vs. the ordinary player like myself.
Sumio Endo, mentioned above, fought in the finals of the 1979 World championships against Vlad Kunetsov. Kunetsov was 6’10" and weighted 290. Endo was ten pounds lighter and 15 inches shorter. In the course of the match, thru the sheer power of their defensive gripping, they tore apart four double weave canvas jackets. It is the equivalent of tearing a piece of sail cloth between your hands, and they each did it twice over.
I could never do that if I trained six hours a day forever.
Practice makes perfect, if it is perfect practice, but elite athletes are born, not made.
Regards,
Shodan
This is true, but in my experience, the natural talent only really starts to separate the wheat from the chaff at the higher levels of performance.
I mean just about anyone can practice themselves into being considered “good” or “very good”, but to get past that, there has to be some degree of natural aptitude. And natural aptitude on its own will only get you so far as well- probably to that same “good”/“very good” point.
I play a lot of video games. I’m not particularly inherently quick or anything, but I’m a decent player- probably “good” would be a description. Why? Because I’ve played video games for going on 30 some-odd years, since I had an Atari 2600.
Even at that, it’s a skill I have to maintain, develop and relearn with each new style of game or type of controller.
But there are people who are just better at it than I am. I have a couple of friends, also in their early 40s who are just better than me. They play more than I do, but their superiority versus me is not proportional to the extra practice time. They’re just better- they were better when I first met them in middle school in 1984, and they’re still better now.
I also think there ought to be some distinction between “practice” and “conditioning” in that one’s a matter of learning the proper techniques, reactions and behaviors, and is fundamentally a mental thing. Conditioning is more of a purely physical phenomenon. An example might be discus throwers- there’s a difference between being in shape to throw the discus and the actual proper technique to throw it. One is got through conditioning, and the other through practice.
I was in a military leadership school and we had to run 1.5 miles once a week as a flight. I was the flight leader. There was one older guy who smoked and was near his max weight. I was afraid that he wouldn’t make the maximum time cut. Hell I was afraid that he’d have a heart attack and die.
Even though I was a runner, he damned near beat me.
I asked him how often he ran. Once a year during the annual fitness test, he said. Turns out that many years before, he was the Georgia state mile champion when in high school.
Genetics have something to do with it.
With enough practice and the right kind of practice anyone can get good to very good at almost anything but to be great you need talent.
There is someone who quit his job and took up golf full time five years ago to see if he good become a great golfer. His website is called the Dan Plan. He is currently a 5 handicap after never having played before when he started. He does seem to have plateaued.
yeah, this is my experience from trying to play guitar. all the “practice” in the world won’t make me a musician.
I know. They should get some more talented journalists, and practice more.
My theory is that with practice and training, pretty much anybody can make it to the 90th percentile in pretty much anything.
It’s the last 10 percent that actually matters, though. I’m never going to win a free-throw contest against a bunch of NBA players no matter how long I practice my shots. But those guys are basically the top 0.1% (probably less) of serious basketball players in the world. Attaining that level requires all the practice and training plus winning a genetic lottery.
My own belief is close to this actually. The “good news”, however, is that I am not good enough in any sport that talent is the bottleneck. I was impressed with him not for becoming a champion (which he was nowhere close to), but for taking up the challenge itself. What do I say, I just have a low bar. 
I think we’ve got the distinction between talent (an innate capacity) and practice (required to achieve what ever our capacity is.)
The other thing I’ll propose is: is there a talent for practice? Why do some people practice for hours a day while I can’t seem to keep it up for more than a few minutes? Is that innate or learned?
Some people are very driven. They picture themselves performing piano in front of an audience, perhaps. Or maybe they’re just methodical.
I have ADHD tendencies myself. Struggle to practice.
You actually picked a bad example here. Lots of NBA players, including some very, very good ones, don’t have great free throw percentages. All their other talents make up for it. Shaquille O’Neal, for example, had a dismal 52% lifetime free throw percentage. Lots of high schoolers who never make it to college teams can beat that.
My standard answer to “you can be anything you want to be!” is “no amount of training will turn 5’4”, female me into an NBA player". Some people have answered that “yes it will! You can do anything if you work hard enough at it!”
After checking that some of those people actually knew what the NBA is, I’ve reached the conclusion that it is possible to be hard of thinking.