4 ms·

Having grown up through the changes to many sports, it feels like the answer is that we only reached a modern approach in the 90's for a lot of sports. People

by LanceH 3y ago

Having grown up through the changes to many sports, it feels like the answer is that we only reached a modern approach in the 90's for a lot of sports. People will cry "steroids", but it's way deeper than that. Weight wasn't everywhere like it is today. It's hard to imagine baseball or basketball without significant weight training, but it seems obvious now. Golfers and runners incorporate weight training which would have been unheard of just 30 years ago (except for that one weird guy). Nutrition has made huge strides. Also the concept of "off season" has largely disappeared. Football players no longer show up to preseason to get into shape -- that's what they were working on the whole summer. Then there is data analytics. Teens have power monitors and more in cycling. Baseball players have pitch tracking and way more. Then the internet. I played soccer in college in the late 80's. We had to learn everything from coaches or a "friend who saw this one thing from a guy they played with when travelling...". Now you can get a technique broken down -- in detail. Coaching has abundant online resources and training on how to run a practice and drill skills, so 8 year olds are receiving a better training. I'm watching this revolution take place right now in wrestling. The sport is getting bigger and better in the US. The difference between how a practice is run in soccer vs wrestling is stark. Wrestling is much more of getting thrown in the deep in and "find what works for you" where soccer is much more programmatic training of skills, raising the fundamental levels across the board. I suspect a lot of sports are going through this at the moment, catching up to the more formalized training methods of the biggest sports. Along these lines, this year we saw a European player dominate the NBA playoffs. Lots of talk about how strong the fundamentals of his game are and whether US players brought up with the solo style (showing off?) system are actually falling behind a bit in technique.

dfxm12 3y ago
It all boils down to money. Yeah, even in the 90s athletes were getting paid a lot of money, but since then, thanks to TV deals, union negotiations, etc., the money is exploding. If you take away Michael Jordan's outlier 2 year $30MM/yr contract, even today's journeymen players are making huge amounts of money relative to the top stars we grew up watching. The stars', and even top draft picks' contracts are in the stratosphere. Thanks to this, a cottage industry around improving performance and longevity has popped up as pro teams wanted to protect their investments. From there, you get people selling these techniques and lessons learned on all levels of sport, for athletes who want to invest in themselves, for parents who want to invest in their kids, for high schools and colleges wanting to get the notoriety through sport, etc. On a side note, whoever is talking about US players losing a step is just trying to be a provocateur.
- borroka 3y ago
  It's not just about money, there are cultural changes that you can see from a distance, but when you are not in the middle of it. For example, I used to play soccer when it was thought that doing weights made one slow or "tied up." When using any form of data was inapplicable because "soccer is different." When using a psychologist was considered weird, queer or a waste of time. And me lifting weights (I watched volleyball players and baseball players coming to the same gym I was going to doing weights all the time), using the little data available to help me better understand the game (I am a scientist after all), and being interested in the psychology of performance was seen as the quirky guy who partly you tolerate, and partly you make fun of. I was right, but I was there too soon. Now everyone lifts weights, everyone uses data to inform decisions, and most professional players use the services of a psychologist or are interested in the psychological aspects of performance. One thing that has changed in a major way is that what was done by the 0.001% of athletes, with the Internet, social media, and the ubiquity of cell phones, has become visible, and even the most stubborn, conservative, and skeptical people have seen how the top-of-the-food-chain trained and operated. It became impossible to deny it, to say "but for us/in our sport, it is different". It was not.
derbOac 3y ago
I don't disagree with you but there's still a lot of sports pseudoscience out there, and/or science that gets ignored, and people can really overestimate the effects of some technique or gear for a given scenario. I guess I see it as the flip side of the coin maybe. Changing the goalposts with improvements in gear and engineering mask a lot of training improvements too in my opinion. In general I feel like maximal performance improves but why it's improving is often a mystery, and whether those improvements would matter to average athletes is also lost on people. There's kind of a shotgun approach to it all, and less so trying to sift through whether a particular thing matters and when. I guess what's frustrating to me is this sense that people just kind of chase around the latest training idea, or latest marginal gear gain, ignoring that it will never make a practical difference to them in particular at their level of performance or setting, or might actually be harmful. My sense is it drives up product costs dramatically due to demand for (or supply limited to?) unnecessary things, and leads to a lot of confusion about what you "should" be doing and bad advice. I think in the past people could also get stuck with bad ideas or worse gear, and would never want to go back in time in athletics, so I don't want to come across as a sort of sports luddite. But I do think the signal to noise ratio has gone way down even as the amount of information has gone way up, and as a result I'm not sure the changes are as beneficial as they could be, or are even harmful or wasteful. In some fields it feels like the very top athletes are maybe performing 1-2% better or something, but we ignore that's due to changing the goalposts sometimes, and everyone else is getting worse or staying the same while spending way more money than they should, even when they're never going to podium at all, nor is that their motivation for being in the sport to begin with. Some fields seem better about this all than others, too, which is kind of interesting to compare and contrast sometimes.
sn9 3y ago
Related: NBA player Joel Embiid taught himself to shoot by watching white guys on Youtube, which he recounts in this article he wrote: https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/joel-embiid-its-story-time https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/joel-embiid-its-s...

by LanceH 3y ago

dfxm12 3y ago

It all boils down to money. Yeah, even in the 90s athletes were getting paid a lot of money, but since then, thanks to TV deals, union negotiations, etc., the money is exploding. If you take away Michael Jordan's outlier 2 year $30MM/yr contract, even today's journeymen players are making huge amounts of money relative to the top stars we grew up watching. The stars', and even top draft picks' contracts are in the stratosphere. Thanks to this, a cottage industry around improving performance and longevity has popped up as pro teams wanted to protect their investments. From there, you get people selling these techniques and lessons learned on all levels of sport, for athletes who want to invest in themselves, for parents who want to invest in their kids, for high schools and colleges wanting to get the notoriety through sport, etc. On a side note, whoever is talking about US players losing a step is just trying to be a provocateur.

borroka 3y ago
It's not just about money, there are cultural changes that you can see from a distance, but when you are not in the middle of it. For example, I used to play soccer when it was thought that doing weights made one slow or "tied up." When using any form of data was inapplicable because "soccer is different." When using a psychologist was considered weird, queer or a waste of time. And me lifting weights (I watched volleyball players and baseball players coming to the same gym I was going to doing weights all the time), using the little data available to help me better understand the game (I am a scientist after all), and being interested in the psychology of performance was seen as the quirky guy who partly you tolerate, and partly you make fun of. I was right, but I was there too soon. Now everyone lifts weights, everyone uses data to inform decisions, and most professional players use the services of a psychologist or are interested in the psychological aspects of performance. One thing that has changed in a major way is that what was done by the 0.001% of athletes, with the Internet, social media, and the ubiquity of cell phones, has become visible, and even the most stubborn, conservative, and skeptical people have seen how the top-of-the-food-chain trained and operated. It became impossible to deny it, to say "but for us/in our sport, it is different". It was not.

derbOac 3y ago

I don't disagree with you but there's still a lot of sports pseudoscience out there, and/or science that gets ignored, and people can really overestimate the effects of some technique or gear for a given scenario. I guess I see it as the flip side of the coin maybe. Changing the goalposts with improvements in gear and engineering mask a lot of training improvements too in my opinion. In general I feel like maximal performance improves but why it's improving is often a mystery, and whether those improvements would matter to average athletes is also lost on people. There's kind of a shotgun approach to it all, and less so trying to sift through whether a particular thing matters and when. I guess what's frustrating to me is this sense that people just kind of chase around the latest training idea, or latest marginal gear gain, ignoring that it will never make a practical difference to them in particular at their level of performance or setting, or might actually be harmful. My sense is it drives up product costs dramatically due to demand for (or supply limited to?) unnecessary things, and leads to a lot of confusion about what you "should" be doing and bad advice. I think in the past people could also get stuck with bad ideas or worse gear, and would never want to go back in time in athletics, so I don't want to come across as a sort of sports luddite. But I do think the signal to noise ratio has gone way down even as the amount of information has gone way up, and as a result I'm not sure the changes are as beneficial as they could be, or are even harmful or wasteful. In some fields it feels like the very top athletes are maybe performing 1-2% better or something, but we ignore that's due to changing the goalposts sometimes, and everyone else is getting worse or staying the same while spending way more money than they should, even when they're never going to podium at all, nor is that their motivation for being in the sport to begin with. Some fields seem better about this all than others, too, which is kind of interesting to compare and contrast sometimes.

sn9 3y ago

Related: NBA player Joel Embiid taught himself to shoot by watching white guys on Youtube, which he recounts in this article he wrote: https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/joel-embiid-its-story-time https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/joel-embiid-its-s...