Working in Movement

It's no secret that world-class athletes are bigger, stronger and faster than their predecessors. The Lab Animal by Michael Sokolove tackles this subject in a New York Times: Science article. Why this relatively recent explosion in elite athletic performance and the resulting records? The article pretty much concedes that drug-enhanced athletic performance is routine, getting harder to detect and will most likely be a routine part of the elite athletic environment in the future.

But these strength and speed enhancements aren't enough in themselves to produce world-class athletic performance. Working out harder and longer or even taking the latest undetectable steroid won't get you very far by themselves. According to the article:

When it comes to elite sport, there is no such thing as self-made. No amount of dedication can turn someone of average ability into a world-class sprinter, an N.B.A. player or a champion marathoner. You can't be an Olympic pistol shooter without some innate steadiness of hand or a Tour de France cyclist without a far-above-average efficiency at moving oxygen to muscles. Even a humdrum, physically unimpressive player on a major-league baseball team has something -- usually extraordinary hand-eye coordination -- that is not apparent to those who regard athletic gifts only in terms of great size, speed, endurance or power. and;

You cannot will yourself into an elite athlete, or get there through punishing workouts, without starting out way ahead of the rest of the human race.

Given this base of athletic talent, the focus of these drug-aided enhancements is bigger muscles and more strength. But, even given raw athletic talent, is strength the whole ball game when it comes to improving athletic performance? Let's not forget conditioning, flexibility and coordination are involved. Granted, conditioning and flexibility would seem to also have strongly genetic bases, and good coordination assumes certain neurological properties.

But there are outliers here, guys like Kyle Maynard, profiled on the current edition of Real Sports on HBO. Maynard is one of the top high school wrestlers in Georgia. He is strong and well-conditioned, but he has no arms or legs. Is it just raw strength and determination that got him to this position?

I'd suggest that Maynard wrestles (and does everything else) with a very accurate image of his body. He has much better than average proprioception, the ability to know what he's doing as he's doing it. Never mind that his body isn't like his opponents; he can handle what he does have with greater skill than most. I've written about proprioception previously.

I guess the bottom line to all this is that improving the kinesthetic sense, the proprioceptive sense, can make up for the lack of a lot of so-called natural ability. Fortunately learning how to do just that is a big part of movement education practices like the Feldenkrais Method.