10 years and 10,000 hours = elite level?

[Guest guest]

The below information may generate further discussion:

The 2008 Pre-Olympic Conference on Science, Education and Medicine in Sport

Patria A Hume1, D Kara2, Liesel Geertsema3 and Celeste Geertsema4

Sportscience 12, 31-40, 2008 (sportsci.org/2008/pah.htm)

Practice, Instruction, Expert Performance

Mark (Liverpool s University, UK) chaired the

session that included Masters (Liverpool s) and

Jonathon Maxwell (University of Hong Kong). What makes the difference

between elite and non-elite athletes? The view that " elite athletes

are born " does not appear to hold true. While the old adage of 10

years and 10,000 hours = elite level (equating to 20-30 hours per

week) still holds some truth, it is not necessarily coached time and

game time that are needed to achieve these numbers.

More evidence around deliberate play or non-coached play (e.g. street

soccer, backyard cricket) can and should provide an important

contribution to performance improvement. Elite athletes are better at

anticipating what is going to happen through visual cues, recognition

of patterns or structures and more accurate search strategies of the

opponent leading to a refined increased in the possible outcomes and

better tactical decisions. It is not as simple as " talent

identification " either.

Motivation of the athlete (both internal and external) would appear

to be the most important factor (probably a strong correlation with

deliberate play) in addition to traditional talent identification

factors. Interesting data from European soccer academies showed that

despite the same anthropometric data your chance of selection into an

academy was improved if your birth data fell within the first three

months of the selection year!

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Carruthers

Wakefield, UK