Faster, Higher, Stronger

Mark Mc Clusky

Athletes have to go through many severe challenges but over the years scientists have been able to lower the difficulty of sports by inventing new training programs and new sports technology.

Athletes have to train a lot but, not the full 10,000 hours that Anders Ericson  had prescribed. He said that in order to master something you have to spend 10,000 hours practicing. When he said this he was talking mostly about musicians. But in terms of sports athletes rarely spend 10,000 hour training for a sport. “ But the lifetime part? Not so much. In fact, only four years earlier, Glover was falling out of the boat on her first attempts to maneuver one.” (1256) Glover is one of the 4,000 women that was chosen for a training program in the U.K. that uses new training methods to train athletes faster. The quote states that the 10,000 hour rule doesn’t apply to everything, sometimes people take longer to master something, but in most sports most people don’t take the full 10,000 hours to master a sport.

Some sports are much harder to master than others, not only because of the skills required but because teamwork is required. For example mastering swimming should take less time than a more complicated sport, like soccer and field hockey. Most people think that swimming is easy because their are only about four major strokes, but swimming is much more complicated than that. You have to time your strokes, have good form, learn how to dive, and most importantly teach your body to keep pushing. A sport like soccer is more complicated because of the skills needed to perform well , but the most difficult part of soccer is working together as a team.

“Researchers have looked at sports ranging for wrestling to field hockey to soccer and found that the usual training requirements to compete at the international level tend to be much less than 10,000 hours. For the wrestlers, it was about 6,000 hours, while the field hockey players took about 4,000 hours, the soccer players about 5,000. Interestingly, these amounts of practice accumulated over the same ten-year time frame that Ericsson proposes, but there are far fewer active hours involved, as compared to musicians in Ericsson’s original study.” (1343)

The quotes shows that the volume of the 10,000 hours is required, at least not for sports. Ericsson’s 10,000 hours is an abundance. But he does illustrate that even though sports don’t require the full 10,000 hours they still require tons of work and effort.

Working together can create new inventions but it can also make people better athletes. At a training facility athletes work together to create a more rigorous program. Athletes and coaches work together to create the ultimate athletes. For example, “The others start doing push-ups with forty five pound weights on their backs competing head to head to see who can complete more.” (126) The quote proves that to become a great athlete you need to have competition, to challenge yourself to become better. As an athlete you have to be driven to complete your goal as an athlete.  With coaches working together you can have an excess of insightful comments and instructions. With these athletes and coaches working together they can all try to reach their perplexing goals.

The book, Faster, Higher, Stronger made me think about how athletes are always trying to outdo the other athletes, but in order for them to become better they have to work together. This book is teaching me that in order to become better than someone you have to work with them first.