There are a wide variety of factors that determine athletic success: genetics, mental attitude, desire, access to training, and often money. Some of us are blessed with more than others.
What Does This Mean to an Athlete?
It means that sooner or later most athletes are going to have to take stock of their situation. They will need to honestly assess their own strengths and weaknesses. assess the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors, and decide where they fit into the competitive picture.
Perhaps because America has always been the land of opportunity, we don't hear much about differences in athletic potential. We want to believe that everyone has an equal chance at success. At the same time, however, we often reject or abandon athletes who aren't winners.
Neither approach to sports is appropriate.
Rather it's a matter of balance. Athletes should always be encouraged to realistically look at themselves, their abilities, and their opportunities. And then if they want to seriously pursue sports, they should be helped and supported in those efforts.
What Is the Single Biggest Success Factor in Sports?
Genetics. According to Hermine Maes, a geneticist who conducted a study of 105 pairs of 10-year-old twins, "What is clear is that genes have something to say, and they will determine what range of fitness you can expect yourself to end up in. If you want to be a top athlete, for instance, you had better have a pretty good set of genes." She determined that approximately 75 percemt of a child's ability to pull weights with the arms and to do bent-arm hangs, two-thirds of a child's vertical-jumping ability, and two-thirds of a male child's aerobic capacity (and 90 percent of a female child's capacity) are related to heredity. (1)
We don't like the idea that genetics determines destiny, but most of us have to admit that body type predetermines success in many sports.
For example, to become a pro basketball player, it helps to be tall. The average NBA player in 1995 was 6 feet 7 1/4 inches. But according to a study conducted in the late 1970s, only 1.7 percent of American men aged 25 to 34 are 6 feet 3 inches or taller (although the study was conducted 20 years ago, the results are still applicable today).
To be an world class gymnast, it's necessary to be flexible and have good balance. It may also help to be petite. In 1992 the average female Olympic gymnast was 4 feet 9 inches and 83 pounds. Example:
To be a record-breaking sprinter, it takes a higher ratio of fast twitch-to-slow twitch muscles than average. According to former pro cyclist Davis Phinney, "Genetics, for one, makes a sprinter. You've got to have it in your muscles. If you don't have a certain amount of explosive power, you can be a good sprinter, but not a great one." (3)
According to Ronald Maughan, a researcher at Aberdeen University in Great Britain, 'We are all born with different muscle fibre compositions which are fixed genetically. Most people have an average of 55 per cent of slow muscle fibre.
"However a good sprinter has an average of just 25 per cent with elite sprinters recording less than 10 per cent, meaning their muscles helped them run shortish burst very fast.
"On the other hand top marathon runners had 85 per cent slow fibre, which would mean they could sustain long, long periods of energy." (4)
Top athletes also have more efficient hearts. "One thing characteristic of all elite athletes is this pumping capacity, or stroke volume ... It's what gets oxygen out to the muscles," said Tom Robertson, a University of Washington professor of medicine and researcher of athletic performance. Training and conditioning can increase stroke volume by only 30 percent at most. The rest is due to genetics. (5)
It is important to note that genetic differences among athletes have not been shown to fall along racial lines. Within every racial group are a wide range of body types and other physical characteristics.
All of this doesn't mean, however, that athletes who don't fit the stereotype can't succeed. Both speed skater Bonnie Blair and swimmer Janet Evans won Olympic gold medals even though they were both considerably smaller than their competitors. Basketball player Muggsy Bogues, at 5' 3", is the shortest NBA player in history. And the NFL reported that during the 1996 season there were 18 running backs who were 5'7" or 5'8".
All and all, a good case can be made that the right training techniques can supersede certain genetic factors. Notes genetics researcher Maes, "One very important aspect of this is that it's not the case that if something is genetic that it cannot change. For example, not all our genes are expressed at every age. With age, different genes might become expressed and influence fitness and other traits.
"Genetic factors are not stable. You can't say: 'It's in the genes so I can't do anything about it.'" (6)
It can also be argued that sometimes training, not genetics, shapes body type. For example, over time marathoners become lean, weight-lifters and discus throwers bulk up, and speed skaters develop massive legs.
Still, if your body type doesn't match the sport you're competing in, there are two points you should keep in mind:
1. You may have a harder time succeeding than someone whose body type better matches the ideal. Keep this in mind before you make a major commitment to training. Example:
2. Don't resort to unhealthy means, such as steroids, human growth hormones, or extreme weight-loss programs, to transform yourself into the ideal body type.
Just because we all admire football players doesn't mean every boy should or can be a John Elway. Just because we shower attention on our best figure skaters doesn't mean every girl should or can be the next Kristi Yamaguchi.
Often we begin training athletes at an early age, before puberty has hit. Girls who show promise at the age of seven or eight in sports such as gymnastics or figure skating sometimes grow into bodies better suited for track or swimming. Boys who develop early and therefore dominate in football and basketball in junior high sometimes fall behind when their classmates catch up to them in high school. Athletes who have invested years in training for one sport are sometimes reluctant to accommodate physical changes and instead resort to "short-cuts."
The statistics are not encouraging:
STEROIDS AND HUMAN GROWTH HORMONES.
According to a report in a medical journal, an estimated five to ten percent of American adolescent boys use steroids. (8)
According to the April 14, 1997 issue of Sports Illustrated, the use of performance enhancing drugs is rampant in Olympic sports.
EATING DISORDERS.
There have been a number of studies reporting that athletes (particularly in sports such as gymnastics and running) engage in unhealthy eating practices.
An NCAA study published in 1995 of 1,443 Division I-A athletes from 10 schools around the country found that 9.2 percent of female athletes had serious eating disorders. Another 49 percent had behaviors which put them at risk of eating disorders.
In 1989 it was reported that one of every ten University of Texas female athletes had an eating disorder. (9)
A survey of elite gymnasts indicated that 28 percent had eating disorder problems. (10)
During the 1980s a sports nutritionist surveyed top American women runners and found that about one-third had eating disorders. (11)
Weight loss problems have also been found among male wrestlers and jockeys. According to a study of 713 high school wrestlers in Wisconsin conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics, 36 percent had two or more behaviors associated with bulimia (binge-eating followed by vomiting or laxative-induced purging).
A study of 171 college wrestlers in Indiana found that 82 percent had fasted for more than 24 hours, 16 percent had used diuretics, and 9.4 percent had induced vomiting at least once a week. (12)
In 1995 Sports Illustrated reported that an administrator and coach of a midget football league in suburban Chicago was giving his young players diuretics to keep them under the weight limit.
It is much better to accept your body type and maximize what you can do with it. Here are quotes from two different athletes, one who fought with her body and one who used hers:
So Should You Forego Certain Sports if You Aren't the Right Size or Shape?
No, not if you really want to compete. But you've got to take your physical assets and liabilities into consideration so you can decide how to use them to your advantage and can accept what you can't change.
Basically you have three choices:
1. Compete in sports where your physical assets are best suited. According to Dr. James Terry, an exercise physiologist, "Seventy per cent of body types are not represented at the Olympics. ... there are sports or physical activities for every body type. There are good and poor activities for everyone. Maybe the person who is naturally heavy shouldn't be a runner. But that person can swim and swim more easily because of the higher percentage of body fat." (15) Examples:
And there are some sports, like fencing, that don't require a certain body type at all. According to Mark Masters, a coach in Philadelphia, "A lot of women who come to fencing haven't participated in conventional sports. In school, they were poor athletes--they couldn't throw a ball, weren't fast runners, couldn't jump high. With fencing, they now have a niche." (18)
2. Compete in the sport you like best and design a competitive strategy that maximizes your abilities. If, for example, you're short, but you want to play basketball, become a three-point specialist because size is less of a factor. That's how 5' 10" Michael Adams succeeded in the NBA. When he played for the Denver Nuggets in the late 1980s, he became the NBA's all-time leader in three-pointers, both made and attempted.
As Dr. Bob Arnot points out in his book, SportsTalent, "Some sports, such as gymnastics, canoeing, and boxing, require a very specific type of physique, while other sports--jogging and cycling, for example, permit a wider range of somatotypes [a term referring to body type--it's the combination of fatness, muscularity, and proportion] and thus can accommodate a wider scattering of numerical sequences." (19)
3. Compete in the sport you like best and accept the fact that you're at a disadvantage. If you don't mind that you may never set records in your sport, go for it.