What Makes a Champion? Early Multidisciplinary Practice, Not Early Specialization...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs...45691620974772

What Makes a Champion? Early Multidisciplinary Practice, Not Early Specialization, Predicts World-Class Performance

Quote:

Abstract What explains the acquisition of exceptional human performance? Does a focus on intensive specialized practice facilitate excellence, or is a multidisciplinary practice background better? We investigated this question in sports. Our meta-analysis involved 51 international study reports with 477 effect sizes from 6,096 athletes, including 772 of the world’s top performers. Predictor variables included starting age, age of reaching defined performance milestones, and amounts of coach-led practice and youth-led play (e.g., pickup games) in the athlete’s respective main sport and in other sports. Analyses revealed that (a) adult world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent multisport practice, started their main sport later, accumulated less main-sport practice, and initially progressed more slowly than did national-class athletes; (b) higher performing youth athletes started playing their main sport earlier, engaged in more main-sport practice but less other-sports practice, and had faster initial progress than did lower performing youth athletes; and (c) youth-led play in any sport had negligible effects on both youth and adult performance. We illustrate parallels from science: Nobel laureates had multidisciplinary study/working experience and slower early progress than did national-level award winners. The findings suggest that variable, multidisciplinary practice experiences are associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.

A couple of years ago after reading the book "Range" I brought up this issue with a friend of mine who is a former internationally competitive gymnast, and whose daughters are high level youth athletes (the elder daughter is a national champion synchronized swimmer in her age group). He was convinced that the opposite is the case, that the way to excellence is complete early specialization. During the somewhat heated discussion I tried only to suggest that he check out the book and make up his own mind, as he certainly knows more about the topic than I do. But he was pretty convinced that there's no point in doing so.

Anyway, the idea that, at least in youth, multidisciplinary study leads to slower but better long term results is interesting to me. Sport seems like a good test case for the hypothesis, though the sentence about Nobel laureates is interesting as well.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3zbVDqL