I’ve recently finished Matthew Syed’s excellent book “Bounce”. Much of it is based on the well known idea that to become an expert requires 10,000 hours of practice, but it’s fleshed out with plenty of good examples, including his own story of how he became a top table tennis player.
There are a couple of important points that I think should have been included. Firstly, how participating in several different sports can reduce the amount of sport-specific practice well below 10,000 hours. Also, the importance of deliberate play in establishing expertise in team sports was not mentioned.
Syed does make the excellent point that the practice must be challenging. He gives the example of someone who’s been driving for years without becoming a better driver, and even possibly becoming a worse driver through the accumulation of bad habits. This is because we’re not practising to improve our skill each time; we’re just trying to get somewhere.
His Chinese coach, Chen Xinhua, increased the intensity of his practice by firing lots of balls at him from different angles, with different spins and speeds. He even widened the table at Syed’s end to make him work harder. Syed’s world ranking rocketed.
Practising an individual (but not usually team) sport for hours on end is not actually inherently enjoyable. Individuals can be motivated to do it when they feel that their performance is improving. But they actually need to have been participating in the activity, and motivated to improve, before embarking on deliberate practice.
The role of parents in this early stage is often crucial. They will notice the child playing, having early attempts at the sport, and feel that there are signs of promise. Whether that feeling is justified or not doesn’t seem to matter much (Bloom 1985). What’s important is that they facilitate further practice and, possibly with the help of teachers or coaches, point out the improvement that they are making as a result of their practice. After a while, the child can monitor the effects of practice for themselves, whilst competitions can provide further motivation for practice. Eventually, practice becomes an integral part both of becoming an expert and of daily life (Ericsson et al 1993). But if the desire to compete at the highest level is lost, the motivation to maintain practice also goes. Kaminsky et al (1984) found that many elite adolescents who decided to stop competing remained active in the sport, but virtually stopped engaging in practice.
Elite performers generally start practising at an earlier age than lesser performers, and spend a large amount of time practising even at a young age: 20 hours a week for 13-year old tennis players (Monsaas 1985) and 24-30 hours a week for swimmers around the age of 11. Kaminsky et al (1984) found that national level swimmers, ice skaters and gymnasts aged 15-16 practised about 16 hours a week, 3 hours longer than those below national level. Sack (1975) found that male national level runners aged 17-18 trained on average 4.9 times a week; runners at regional and local levels trained on average 4.2 and 3.2 times a week respectively.
There is a limit, however, to how much practice is sensible. Studies have shown essentially no benefit from practising for more than 4 hours a day, and reduced benefit after 2 hours a day (Welford 1968). The actual desirable amount is limited by the individual’s ability to recover mentally and physically. If the individual can’t recover each day from a given level of practice, sustaining that level will lead to exhaustion and mental fatigue. In athletics, for instance, this results in injuries such as “runner’s knee”, shin splints and Achilles tendonitis.
An inability to recover mentally from practice leads to staleness and burnout, as well as the physical problems of fatigue and soreness. The individual may start to become unenthusiastic about practice, and may drop out of the sport altogether. This can be the fate of those who started practising at a later age than the best of their peers, and who try to catch up by suddenly increasing their hours of deliberate practice. But those who started earlier, and built up their practice hours more gradually, are able to sustain maximal levels without suffering from exhaustion. In contrast, those trying to catch up quickly by practising at the level or even above the level of the best performers are likely to encounter injuries and exhaustion.
Finally, the demands on parents, both financially and in terms of their spare time, can be very high at elite levels of sport. Back in 1988 in the US, Chambliss estimated the parents’ costs for a national level swimmer to be over $5,000 a year.
So, whilst an understanding of sports vision can improve performance, don’t expect it to turn you into a world beater overnight.
David Donner
www.donneroptometrists.co.uk
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