Talent vs. Training debate considered

Drs. Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas run a blog called The Science of Sport, on which they discuss and analyze the latest ideas in sports performance. It's a bit like posts on this blog, except that they're doctors and know a whole lot more than me. But as I'm sometimes told, you have to start somewhere so you might as well just dive in and learn.

Recently, Ross Tucker wrote a post on a discussion he had at a conference in London on the talent vs. training debate. In it, he challenges modern thinkers like Matthew Syed and Malcolm Gladwell, who claim that talent is a myth, and that success is merely a function of sufficient training and opportunity. 

Dr. Tucker contends that such claims do two things. First, they states what many believe is obvious; that elite performance requires considerable practice. While talent alone may give some an advantage in a competition where no one is trained, that talent becomes increasingly insufficient as the quality of competition increases, or as Dr. Tucker writes:

"...individuals who attempt to [get] by on talent alone are washed away in this more competitive landscape...the key is that the athlete who succeeds all the way to the Olympic podium is the one who dominated without training (that is, he's talented or genetically gifted), but then trained incredibly hard to stay a champion as the competition intensified." 

In this way, Dr. Tucker believes that thinkers like Syed and Gladwell simply state the obvious when they claim that practice is necessary for elite performance.

Accordingly, Dr. Tucker believes that the second thing Mr. Syed's and Gladwell's claims do is "unnecessarily polarize[-] the complexity of performance by ignoring genes and talent." As described above, Dr. Tucker does not believe that talent alone makes a champion when everyone is highly trained. But he does claim that talent and genes play a role in selecting those individuals who are peculiarly well-endowed for a particular activity. To be fair, Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers suggests something similar in the form of a "threshold," or a level of endowment which great achievers must usually possess. Gladwell describes this idea most clearly as follows:

"What Hudson is saying is that IQ is a lot like height in basketball. Does someone who is five foot six have a realistic chance of playing professional basketball? Not really. You need to be at least six foot or six one to play at that level, and, all things being equal, it's probably better to be six two than six one, and better to be six three than six two. But past a certain point, height stops mattering so much. A player who is is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter...A basketball player only has to be tall enough--and the same is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a threshold" (Gladwell 2008, 80).  

In other words, as much as Gladwell points to practice, nurture, and other things later in his book, he too recognizes--on some level--the role that talent and genes play in performance. 

But returning to Dr. Tucker's post, he ultimately concludes that "training is the realization of genetic potential." In other words, you need to practice if you want to be as good as your talent allows, but practice alone won't make a champion. Even Arthur Lydiard, a firm believer in the power of training to produce champions, pointed to the role of innate ability when he stressed that middle-distance runners needed natural speed to win the big race. Good practice only prepares the body to race, and get the racer to the last 200m "tireless" so they could use their natural speed for the finish, passing their less-conditioned (but often naturally  faster) opponents. 

And perhaps that is the lesson we should draw from Dr. Tucker's discussion of the issue. If you want to realize your full potential, it would seem that you absolutely must practice. Talent appears to be a vital component, but in a field of relatively equal talent (such as an Olympic final), other factors start coming into play. Differences in practice may prove the vital difference.

With that said, too much training can be as much if not more of a detriment than too little. As an earlier discussion on overtraining described, training more than the body can handle appears to lead to poor performance, and in the worse cases, "premature decline." Striking a balance appears essential.

So to summarize, Dr. Tucker contends:

1.) Practice alone does not make elite athletes (or elite performers)

2.) Genes (and variations of genes) and talent play an important role in performance.

3.) In a relatively equal talent pool, differences in training matter. 

I encourage you to consider these points further, bearing in mind that as scientifically-based conclusions, they are subject to revision and improvement. Much luck!

Happy Saturday, friends :)