The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (41 page)
Read The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance Online
Authors: David Epstein
Tags: #Non-Fiction
myostatin gene mutation and,
103
–4
speed plateau,
52
Sports Illustrated,
283
Springstein, Thomas,
106
sprinting.
See
speed
Stadler, Mike,
42
Starkes, Janet
on innate genetic differences,
54
–55
Steele, Michelle,
49
Sternberg, Wendy,
263
–64
Stewart, Kerron,
171
–72
stop codon,
277
stress-induced analgesia,
263
stretch shortening cycle,
32
–33
Sudanese runners,
199
–201
sudden death in athletes, and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).
See
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM)
Swenson, Rick,
225
–26
Sylvia, Tim,
263
Tadese, Zersenay,
198
Talent is Overrated
(Colvin),
19
talent transfer,
50
Tanui, Moses,
207
targeting skills,
62
Tay-Sachs disease,
146
technological enhancements, and improvement in athletic performance,
115
tendon injuries,
257
–59
tennis
occlusion test and,
12
Schneider’s study of general athleticism and tennis skill acquisition in children,
44
–46
10,000 hours to expertise rule,
16
–23,
114
–15
as average number of hours to reach expertise,
21
–23
early childhood specialization and,
51
–53
Ericsson’s study,
16
–17
McLaughlin’s golf experiment and,
18
–20
ten-year rule.
See
10,000 hours to expertise rule
T/E ratio testing, genes conferring immunity to,
148
effect of, in females,
69
levels of, as test for sex,
70
male puberty and,
67
–68
This Week in Baseball
(TV show),
3
Thompson, Paul D.,
252
Thorndike, Edward,
34
–36
threshold hypothesis,
131
–32
throwing skills,
61
–62
Tibetans,
211
–12
Timmons, Bob,
78
“Toward a Science of Exceptional Achievement” (Ericsson),
16
–17
trainability,
75
–99
above-average response to training,
86
–89
altitude and,
214
–15
genes and,
83
–85
HERITAGE Family Study and,
79
–86,
290
high baseline aerobic fitness and,
89
–99
high responder to training coupled with high baseline aerobic capacity,
95
–99
of muscles,
107
–13
running economy and,
221
sled dogs and,
231
–32
transforming growth factor-ß,
101
transgenes,
105
–6
TRP-792 frameshift,
248
Tucker, Ross,
52
–53
Tulu, Derartu,
209
21-hydroxylase deficiency,
71
–72
UGT2B17 gene,
148
U.S. News & World Report,
59
Van Loo, Anthony,
251
variance
defined,
37
in skill performance,
36
–37
violinists, study of,
14
–16
visual acuity,
38
–43
cone density and,
39
in general population,
40
of major league baseball players,
38
–43
theoretical limit of,
39
of U.S. Olympians,
43
in young people,
40
–41
Vitruvian Man
(da Vinci),
115
,
134
VO
2
max (aerobic capacity).
See
aerobic capacity (VO
2
max)
volleyball, and occlusion test,
6
–7
voluntary physical activity,
234
–41
compulsive,
234
–38
dopamine system and,
239
–40
genetics and,
238
–41
twin studies and,
238
–39
Vuopio, Pekka,
274
Wade, Dwyane,
134
Walker, Herschel,
237
–38
Wall, John,
134
warrior-slave theory, of Jamaican sprinters,
163
–66
warrior/worrier gene,
262
Webb, Spud,
133
Wechsler, David,
36
Wellington, Chrissie,
91
–95,
237
,
289
West Indian Medical Journal,
175
Wheating, Andrew,
96
Whitbourne, Fay,
178
Who Do You Think You Are?
(BBC program),
167
Why Dick Fosbury Flopped
(Farrow & Kemp),
91
Why Michael Couldn’t Hit
(Klawans),
51
Williams, Ferron,
162
Williams, Ted,
41
“Will Women Soon Outrun Men” (Whipp & Ward),
59
Wilson, Vicki,
34
winner-take-all markets,
114
,
115
,
132
Big Bang of body types and,
116
,
117
“Women Will Do It in the Long Run” (Beneke, Leithäuser & Dopplmayr),
59
Woods, Tiger,
53
work ethic, breeding for
in mice,
233
–34
in sled dogs,
223
–25,
227
–30,
232
–33
Wyeth,
105
youth track programs, in Jamaica,
169
–74
Yuot, Macharia,
200
*
We all use forms of chunking every day. Consider language: if I give you a twenty-word sentence to remember, you will have a much easier time repeating it than if I give you twenty random words that have no meaningful relationship to one another.
*
Pro cricket teams have been moving away from using bowling machines, because they don’t train the body recognition skills that hitters need for anticipation.
*
According to analysis by hitting coach Perry Husband of all 500,000 pitches from one full MLB season, on pitches that were directly down the middle major leaguers hit .462 when the count was two balls and zero strikes, and .362 when the count was zero balls and two strikes—a 100-point difference based solely on count information that helped hitters to anticipate the next pitch.
*
Another striking result was that chess pros were twice as likely as non–chess pros to be left-handed.
*
Someone who scores 20/15 can stand at a distance of twenty feet and tell the difference between an
o
and a
c
that the typical person, with 20/20 vision, could only detect if they scooted up to fifteen feet.
*
The legend that he could read the label on a spinning record, though, was a myth, according to Williams.
*
A study of U.S. Open tennis players also found much better visual acuity than non–tennis pros of the same age, but a few players had normal visual acuity, which suggests that excellent visual acuity is advantageous but that average vision is not an insurmountable obstacle for all tennis pros.
*
Some rare athletes simply do have superior reaction speeds. In a 1969 test, Muhammad Ali reacted to a light in 150 milliseconds, near the theoretical limit of human visual reaction time.
*
There is some evidence that playing video games may improve contrast sensitivity somewhat. But they have to be action games. A relevant study found that Call of Duty 2 helped, but The Sims 2 did not.
*
The only players who ever made up some of the sprint-speed gap were those who had not yet gone through their growth spurt—“peak height velocity,” in science lingo—when they were first tested. The Groningen group tracks the height growth of players so that they can inform a coach if he’s underestimating a player who simply has not yet hit puberty. Even so, markedly slow players simply never catch up, growth spurt or not.
*
Jordan had a .202 batting average in 127 games in AA minor league baseball. Clearly, he wasn’t headed to the majors anytime soon. Still, how many adults who haven’t played baseball in fifteen years could walk into AA ball, playing against former college stars and future major league pros, and hit .202? My guess is that many people would hit .000.
*
A study of music students at Chetham’s School of Music in England found a similar pattern. In the early stages of development, the “exceptional ability” students actually practiced consistently
less
than the “average ability” students and only later ramped up their training.
*
Newspapers breathlessly told of women in the 800 falling all over the track. As a 2012 article in
Running Times
reported, there was only one woman who collapsed at the finish, and three others beat the previous world record. A reporter for the
New York Evening Post
who supposedly attended the race wrote of “11 wretched women,” five of whom did not finish and five of whom collapsed after the line.
Running Times
reported that there were only nine women in the race and that they all finished.
*
The idea that female runners surpass men as the distance of the race gets longer has been pervasive in the past. It is a topic in Christopher McDougall’s fascinating
Born to Run
. But it’s not quite true. The 11 percent gap among the very best performers is as firm at the longest distances as at the shortest. That said, South African physiologists found that when a man and a woman are matched for their marathon time, the man will typically beat the woman at distances shorter than the marathon, but the woman will win if the race length is extended to forty miles. They reported that this is because men are usually taller and heavier, big disadvantages the longer the race goes. Among the world’s top ultramarathoners, however, the male/female size differences are smaller than in the general population, and the 11 percent performance gap exists between the best of the best of men and women in ultradistance as well.
*
Lefties are rare, so opponents do not face them regularly and consequently have a shallow mental database of their body movements, giving southpaws what scientists call a “negative frequency dependent advantage.” In the foil fencing competition at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, for example, the entire six-man final pool was made up of lefties. French scientists Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond have analyzed the higher rates of left-handedness in native societies with more hand-to-hand combat. They, and others, have hypothesized that natural selection preserves a certain amount of left-handedness, particularly in males, as a combat advantage.
*
The idea that women are more pain tolerant than men because they go through childbirth is a myth contradicted by every study done on the topic. Women are more sensitive to pain and much more likely to be chronic pain patients. Women do, however, become less sensitive to pain as they approach childbirth.
*
400-meter dash records:
nine-year-old boys: 1:00.87 fourteen-year-old boys: 46.96
nine-year-old girls: 1:00.56 fourteen-year-old girls: 52.68