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"The Sports Gene: Talent, Practice and the Truth about Success" by David Epstein: A Summary and My Thoughts On It
Preface
It’s been a year to the day since I had my ACL reconstruction surgery. It’s also been a year since I read by David Epstein. I knew I was going to have ample free time during my recovery so I thought it was an ideal time to read it. I heard about the book in a couple of different places and I thought it was time to read about the nurture side to the nature vs nutture debate (read about my review and application of the book Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice” by Matthew Syed on the nurture argument to the debate).
I reread the book over Christmas and I thought it was a great opportunity to write about it.
Content
The book essentially reviews the nature versus nurture debate in sporting excellence and explodes myths about how and why humans excel. I will write a summary followed by my thoughts on it.
Chapter Summary
Introduction:
David Epstein puts forward the question that we all knew somebody in high school who was a , somebody who was great at sports and made it all too easy. His example was Micheno Lawrence. He was fast and he could play sports. This was the starting platform where Epstein goes on about the basic nature vs nurture debate. Did Eli and Peyton Manning inherit their father Archie’s quarterback genes or did they grow up to be Super Bowl MVPs because they were raised with an American football in their hand.
1. Beat by an Underhand Girl: The Gene-Free Model of Expertise
This chapter makes a case for practice. It starts with the case study of Jennie Finch, USA softball Olympic Gold medallist, and how she would strike out MLB star hitters with her underhand rockets. She’ll turn them into absolute novices. The reason behind this is because MLB star hitters have built up a large mental database of baseball pitches and can anticipate how the ball will be pitched by certain critical cues before the ball is thrown much earlier than a novice can. This enables them to “see into the future” and why they are able to crush those 95 mph balls. However, when Finch is pitching softballs, they go back to relative novices because they don’t have that mental database to enables them to anticipate where the ball is going. These anticipatory skills are not innate but learned via practice.
2. A Tale of Two High Jumpers: (Or: 10,000 Hours Plus or Minus 10,000 Hours)
This chapter makes a case for talent. It starts with a case study of Swedish high jumper Stefan Holm and his 20 year deliberate training in high jumping is that picture perfect case for practice. He won the Gold medal at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games clearing 7’9″. Then there is the case study of Donald Thomas. On a bet, he easily cleared 6’6″ on his first jump. He then cleared 6’8″ on his second jump and then cleared 7’0″ on his third jump. He did this all without without practice and without any discernible technique (e.g. no arched back). After a total of eight months of legitimate high-jump training, Thomas went to the Osaka 2007 World Championships actually won, clearing 7’8.5″. Stefan Holm came in fourth place. Researchers found Thomas had abnormally long Achilles tendon, which enables an athlete to get more power from the stretch-shortening cycle. Although, the Achilles tendon is not the sole secret to jumping success, it does help to part explain why two athletes could arrive essentially at the same place, one after a 20 year obsession with high jumping and the other with less than a year of serious practice who found high jumping “a bit boring”. To date, Thomas never improved on that height which contradicts the case for practice.
In addition, the 10,000 hour rule is not absolute. Chess players reached master level on average 11,000 hours. However, the range was vastly different, where one player took 3,000 hours to reach that level while another took 23,000 hours. This equates to a difference of 20 years for two players to essentially arrive in the same place (assuming if one practices for 20 hours a week for 50 weeks a year). That is if a player will ever reach that level.
3. Major League Vision and the Greatest Child Athlete Sample Ever: The Hardware and Software Paradigm
This chapter makes the case that to be successful, you need the innate hardware and learned software. It starts with another case study of Louis J. Rosebaum, an ophthalmologist for LA Dodgers, found players tested off the chart for visual acuity (the ability to see detail in moving objects) with an average of 20/13, which is incredibly rare in the general population. So while major league players may not have a superior reaction time (generally at 200 milliseconds), they do have superior vision that helps them pick up anticipatory cues earlier. This would give them the starting hardware that will enable them to play at the highest level. That is, after they learnt the necessary software.
Marije Elferink-Gemser, of the University of Groningen’s Center for Human Movement Sciences, found when testing youth soccer players in Netherlands that some of the traits that help predict future pros are behavioural. Future pros not only tend to practice more, but they take responsibility for practicing better. They would ask the trainer, “Why should I do this” if they don’t agree with the training.
4. Why Men have Nipples?
This chapter looks at the physiological differences between men and women, specifically relating to testosterone. Basically, men produce more testosterone compared to women and are able to use it more. It means men have 80% more muscle mass in the upper body. In fact, the difference is so vast that if you pull 1,000 men off the street, 997 of them would have stronger upper body strength than the average woman. It also debunks the myth that women are closing the performance gap on men. It was based on the fact that the world records for women, such as athletics, were improving faster than men during the 1970s/80s and by 2050, the performance gap would disappear. However, what they didn’t account for that the use of performance enhancing drugs by the Eastern Bloc during that time. Since that time, there has been a performance gap of roughly 11% between men and women from the 100m to the marathon.
5. The Talent of Trainability
This chapter puts forward the idea of baseline and trainability. It starts with a case study of Jim Ryun, who wanted to be a sports star who wasn’t any good at any sport. He eventually stumbled upon cross-country running. In his first race, he was only the 21st best runner for the school, good enough for the C-team. Six weeks after the start of the season, on training no difference from his C-team peers, he moved up to junior varsity. Two months later, he led the varsity to the Kansas state championship. After his coach planted the seed of running a sub 4 minute mile and his subsequent punishing training (100+ mile weeks), he found success. After two seasons of track, he was selected for the 1964 US Olympic team. In 1966, he ran the mile in a world record time of 3:51.3. So his high trainability enable him to rise through the ranks extremely quickly whereas those on the original C-team would not have.
The HERITAGE (HEalth, RIsk factors, exercise Training And GEnetics) family study enlisted 98 two generation families to subject their members to five months of identical stationary bicycle training regimens – three workouts per week of increasing intensity that would be strictly controlled in the lab. It measured aerobic capacity (VO2 max) and found about 15% of participants showed little or no gain whatsoever after five months of training all the way up to 15% of participants who improved dramatically, increasing the amount of oxygen their bodies could use by 50% or more. Additionally, the amount of improvement one person experienced had nothing to do with how good they were at the start. That is, some people with low aerobic capacity improved little and some people improved rapidly. It was a similar case with people with a high aerobic capacity. The HERITAGE study was paired with mapping the participants’ genes and found 21 gene variants that had the power to delineate the high and low responders to training. HERITAGE subjects who had at least 19 of the “favourable” versions of the genes improved their VO2 max nearly three times as much as subjects who had fewer than ten. A spectrum of low and high responders appeared in every physical quality measured and the research team is busy looking for genes that predict trainability for each trait. So the goal would be to find a high baseliner who is also a high responder.
6. Superbaby, Bully Whippets, and the Trainability of Muscle
This chapter looks at the gene mutation that results in “double muscle” and the trainability of muscle. The “superbaby” in the title refers to a case study of a newborn baby that had a chiselled body, or “double muscle”. They found the baby had mutations on both of his myostatin genes that left him with no detectable myostatin in his blood. Myostatin is a protein that signals the muscle to stop growing. In the absence of myostatin, muscle growth explodes.
Trainability also exists in muscle. There seemed to be non-responders (0% in muscle growth after a four-month strength program), moderate responders (25% in muscle growth) and extreme responders (50% in muscle growth). Muscle growth is also affected by a person’s muscular make-up, i.e. the percentage of fast twitch muscles (explosive but tired quickly) and slow twitch muscles (less explosive but tired less quickly). A person with a high percentage of fast twitch muscles, like in sprinters, will have the greater muscle growth potential compared to those with a high percentage of slow twitch muscle. By understanding the muscle type a person predominately has, you can steer them into a sport that suits them, e.g. a person with a high percentage of slow twitch muscle is probably better suited to endurance events rather than sprint events.
Training itself should be specific to athletes. For example, although fast players are highly valued in football (future pros tend to be fast), Jesper Anderson found that Danish professional players had fewer fast-twitch fibres than the average person. He found the swiftest players were lost due to chronic injuries before they ever reach the top level. This was because every player was trained the same and the swiftest players couldn’t tolerate as much training as the others. The less injury-prone players, i.e. the slow-twitchers, survive the developmental years, which is why the Danish elite level ended up skewed toward the slow twitch.
8. The Big Bang of Body Types
This chapter discusses the big bang of body types. It is the phenomenon that in the 1920s, it was thought there was only one ideal body type for all sports, something like Leonardo Di Vinci’s However, due to the increasing globalisation of sport and winner-takes-all market of sport, elite athletes of today has moved away from the to highly specialised body types in an extreme form of self-selection. For example, volleyball players are, unsurprisingly, getting larger. Also, volleyball players have short torsos and comparatively long legs. This is better for accelerating the lower limbs to get a more powerful jump.
There are also more examples of body specialisation. For example, runners tend to have longer legs than the average population while swimmers tend to have longer torsos than shorter legs. In fact, Michael Phelps, at 6’4″, reportedly has an 32-inch inseam, shorter than those worn by Hicham El Guerrouj, the Moroccan runner who is 5’9″ and holds the world record in the mile.
Chapter 9 to 16
These chapters touch upon a range of examples, perhaps exploding some myths on the way. One chapter discusses a basketball example of a the big bang of body types. You need to be tall to play high level basketball. Data suggests that find six 7’0″ American men who are between the ages of 20 to 40 and and one of them are in the NBA right now. Also, wing span is important too, especially as it can make up for height. If height and wing span are considered together, they account for half of an NBA player’s defensive boards, without even considering traits like jumping ability, weight, position or general rebounding skill.
There are also some chapters on how some genetic mutations can confer sporting advantages. For example, theory that West Africans evolved characteristics like a high prevalence of the gene mutations, such as sickle-cell trait, that causes low haemoglobin for protection from malaria, and that an increase in fast-twitch muscle fibres followed from that, providing more energy production from a pathway that does not primarily rely on oxygen, for people who have reduced capacity to produce energy with oxygen. This is following evidence that athletes who are sickle-cell carriers are numerous in short duration events and less numerous in long duration events.
Some chapters also highlights the combining effect of the environment. For example, Jamaicans are generally found to have the right type of ACTN3 gene, which is linked to speed. However, Jamaica’s sprinting success is also down to their talent identification system. Every child is made to sprint at some point in their childhood and those who are identified as fast are kept in the system. They gain the big event experience through the Inter-Secondary Schools Boys and Girls Championships (better known as the Champs), a four day athletics event. In other countries, fast children may pursue other sports, popular in their countries. For example, if 6’5″ Usain Bolt lived in the USA, he may have opted to pursue popular and high paid sport such as American football or basketball.
Epilogue: The Perfect Athlete
Epstein surmises that it is 100% nature and 100% nurture. You need to maximise both. He does end on the nice idea that everybody has a different genetic make-up. Therefore, for optimal development, you just need a different environment. That is, don’t be afraid to do different sports or train in a different way.
Thoughts
I really enjoyed reading the book. I thought the introduction was very clever when he stated everybody knew of a natural athlete in high school. I certainly did and his name was Mohamed Kamara. He came from Sierra Leone aged 11 and we were in the same class on the first day of high school. He was a tall, fast, muscular guy who seemed to pick up sports very quickly. Like a Bo Jackson legendary story, I once saw Mohamed throw a tennis ball 30 feet in the air to knock down a football that got stuck on tree branches. He did it first time too. After reading the book, it was probably no surprise that he came from west Africa, the centre of fast athletes. Anyway, I thought it was very clever because he stated a truth that you can identify with, which will probably make you more open to his work.
I liked that first half of the book because it gave the nuts and bolts of the nurture side of the debate. Epstein constructed the argument well by giving case studies first to demonstrate a particular theory, which was backed up by research. He exploded the myth about the 10,000 hour theory. The difference in the number of hours for two people to essentially reach the same place can be as much as 20 years. Even more telling is that is if they even reach that level at all. Not everybody can be elite.
Another idea I personally identified with is the idea of trainability. It explains how after 18 months weight training in the gym, I didn’t really improve on the 30kg bench press for 10 reps (similarly for 35kg for 6 reps and 25% for 15 reps). I was definite a non-responder for strength training (certainly for upper body; my lower body did improve a little). Similarly, I started to focus on my core and cardio. My starting personal best for the 5km was 29 minutes at the beginning and within four weeks, I reduced that time to about 23 minutes. I was (probably) a moderate responder for aerobic training.
When it came to the section of identifying specific genes, I became less interested in it. It was because many genes contribute to body characteristics and some of the genes that was identified, e.g. myostatin and ACTN3 gene, only gave a small picture of what was going on. Also, if you need to know if somebody is tall, you don’t need to know whether they have the genes for it, you just get a tape measure.
Two Takeaways
There were three things I took away from this for greater practical use. The first was why doesn’t the UK use this information of body types to create a comprehensive talent identification system. Have a day a year in school where you do all kinds of measurements, e.g. height, wing span, 100m sprints, vertical jump etc, and use the results to nudge children into a couple of sports that would suit them. While not everybody will achieve elite level status, they may enjoy it enough to make it a lifelong participation. On the elite ends of things, I think about height as a precious commodity so we should get the tallest kids and nudging them into sports like volleyball. I like to see England/ GB volleyball succeed and even get into the Olympics again.
The other thing I took away was the idea you shouldn’t train everybody the same way. There is a belief that more training, the better (up to a certain point like 20 hours a week). This is probably fuelled by the 10,000 hours theory. Fast athletes are highly valued in a lot of sports, but it seems like we need to train fast players with less volume but higher intensity because it suits their fast-twitch muscles. It reminded me of Craig Bellamy, who was injury prone but after a change in his training (“50% less but at 120 mph”), he was able to play more games and was in the top three in highest work-rate. It also makes me think about the UFC, where they had a injury-ridden 2014 where so many fights had to be changed, postponed or even cancelled due to injury. It is because they train too hard?
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