#127： The Sports Gene With David Epstein
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Summary
The Art of Manliness podcast is a debate that goes back for millennia. Are great athletes made or are they born well? Our guest today explores this question in his controversial book, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of extraordinary athletic performance by David Epstein.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so it's a debate
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that goes back for millennia are great athletes made or are they born well our guest today explores
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this question in his controversial book the sports dean inside the science of extraordinary
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athletic performance his name is david epstein really fascinating book and today on the podcast
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we're going to discuss what the latest research says about top athletic performance is it a nature
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versus nurture or is it a combination of both well we talk about the differences the genetic
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differences between men and women and how those differences have given men the upper hand in
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athletic performance like sprinting and football and things like that then we also discuss what
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this means this research means for parents we have kids right should you invest a lot of money
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and time into your kid into a sport that they might not ever make it to the top echelons or even like
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college level in that sport really fascinating discussion a lot of food for thought i think
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you're really going to enjoy this so let's get on with the show david epstein the sports dean
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david epstein welcome to the show thanks for having me all right um so your book is the sports gene
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and it's about the the effect or the role of genetics in athletic ability and not just athletic ability
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carries over to other uh aspects as well but before we understood the role genes play in our athletic
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performance our physical abilities what was the understanding or what was the role of genetics
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before our understanding of genetics i mean how did we approach athletics was it just a practice or if
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you if you just practice a lot you get better what was it yeah well i think you know from the from
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kind of the perspective of sports scientists things had whipsawed basically so there was there was a
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period you know maybe starting early early half the 20th century where there was this idea that there
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were just any someone who was athletic this sort of medium height medium weight man would be the
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best for all sports and you just had to pick him out and uh you know maybe sometimes test his reaction
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speed or something and then you just put them in any sport you want and so it was sort of this idea
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that there was a template like very genetic and then it the pendulum totally swung back in the other
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direction to the idea that genes have no other than for height because it's easily observable by
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everyone have no part to play in athletic expertise sort of that birth of the 10 000 hour rule this idea
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that what we think of as genetic talent is really just a manifestation of thousands of hours of
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practice there is no such thing you know genetics the work and practice and motivation overwhelms any
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reasonable effect of genetics so we shouldn't even bother studying genetics involved in athleticism
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and that's kind of where it was when uh when i decided to pick it up yeah so this this idea of the
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10 000 hour rule i mean i love it because i don't think i'm naturally gifted a naturally gifted
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athlete but i love that concept if i practice hard enough if i work hard enough well eventually i'll
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get there but the research is showing that that's not necessarily the case yeah and to specify in so far
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as the 10 000 hour rule is shorthand for a lot of very high quality and quality probably more
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important than quantity in many cases practice is really important absolutely that's great but a lot
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of the people writing about it were using it to say that well genes actually don't matter and that's
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in fact not not what's being found at all in fact what's kind of coming out of uh the genetic
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revolution in exercise and sports is the same as what came out of medical genetics and that was
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say because you have a different gene involved in the acetaminophen metabolism than i do
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you might need three tylenol to get the same effect where i only need one or maybe it doesn't
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work for you at all we're seeing the same thing in sports training that the amount that anyone
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improves in response to a given training stimulus is mediated by their genes so no one person's 10 000
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hours is another person's 10 000 hours and in fact all of these hours figures that people throw out
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are just averages that have these tremendously disparate ranges so even in you know even in things like
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um chess which requires a lot of the same perceptual expertise that sports like uh like football and
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soccer do it takes 11 000 53 hours on average to become an international master to learn all those
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cognitive skills but some people make it in 3 000 hours because they learn each chunk of information
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faster and some people make it all right 25 000 hours still being tracked and haven't made it
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and so really when we look at any of these hour figures there's a huge huge uh range of hours it takes
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to get anywhere and a lot of that is based on the intricacies of people's talents so so my argument
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is that we really need to help people find some of those hidden talents so that they don't need 10
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10 000 hours yeah yeah so you talk to explain this idea that the 10 000 hour rule is there's
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discrepancies right you can have you can master it in a few hours or it might take you a long time
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yeah you give the example these two high jumpers which i thought was really fascinating can you tell the
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story about these two guys yeah sure this that i call the tale of two high jumpers so one of the
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high jumpers was this guy stefan holm and uh he's a swedish guy who became obsessed with high jump
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after seeing on television at age five starts jumping in his backyard you know has his father
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doesn't know anything about high jump but builds him a set in the backyard and he's he's good but
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he's not great you know you wouldn't necessarily think you know with high jump jumping kind of
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something you either got or you don't and he's he's good again but not great stays obsessed with
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it he's pitching class in middle school to go jump um and he's he starts getting better and better
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little by little improves actually one centimeter per year for 20 straight years
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uh until he becomes the olympic champion he's he's about five foot ten clears a bar nearly eight
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feet so he tied the record for the highest clearance over your own head and and he had like all these
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traits that we idealize in competitive athletes when i first talked to him he said you know i was
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asking about a girlfriend i don't have a girlfriend high jumps my girlfriend i can't cheat on her
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and then when i went back to him he's he's married now he has a little kid and the kid's name is
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melwin holm and that's not a typical swedish name his wife like the name melvin and stefan
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insisted that win be somewhere in the kid's name so that that's the kind of guy he was you know
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totally devoted to this and transformed himself into an olympic champion and at the world championships
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i wrote about a rival of his a guy from the bahamas he gets a rival named donald thomas and donald
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wasn't a jumper at all for most of his life he's talking trash about how good an athlete he is at
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lunch one day he was a student at a small college in missouri called lindenwood and the best jumper
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a guy named carlos on the track team who held the school record at six foot eight says you're
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talking you know you're talking all that trash you wouldn't even clear a bar of six foot six in
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competition and donald's like well yeah i would so carlos goes and sets up a bar donald gets his
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sneakers takes five steps and clears six foot six so they move it up to six foot eight takes seven
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steps clear six foot eight moves it up to six ten donald clears six ten seven feet clears that and then
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at which point carlos stops him he thinks he's gonna hurt himself takes him to track coach coach we got
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seven foot high jumper here coach doesn't believe it they convince him he called the next track meet
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eastern illinois university gets a late entry for donald donald's like wearing basketball shorts
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doesn't have a uniform yet clears seven foot five and sets that field house record and there's
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pictures i have pictures of him with his arms behind him because he's like not used to the feeling of
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falling backward coming down from seven foot five so he turns pro you know after about eight months of
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training who does he face in the world championships but stefan holm so one guy has about zero hours of
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training one guy stefan holm estimated his lifetime training at 20 000 hours so those guys actually
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averaged 10 000 hours and donald ends up winning the world championship there actually if donald had
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any semblance of form for a high jumper like donald he doesn't curl his back he looks like he's like
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riding an invisible deck chair through the air you know he's like sitting straight up and like looking
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around he had the highest center of mass jump ever he had known like anything whereas stefan's like curled
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you know like his his his heels are like whispering in his ear they're almost touched
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and had donald had any type of form he would have shattered the world record so here are these two
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guys when he's you know pretty straightforward physiological sport coming from complete polar
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opposite paths and some of that that went on to explain uh had to do with their very special springs in
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the back of their legs the achilles tendon okay i mean what i thought was interesting too is you make
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the point that you know we're just starting to scratch the surface of sports genetics um but it
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seems like it there's been sort of a natural sorting uh amongst the various sports when it comes to
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genetics for example swimmers because their arms are getting longer uh every year um runners they're
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getting you know they have a certain type of fast twitch muscle fiber and then you're seeing that more
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and more often how did that happen like how did is it just that people who had that capability like
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they just they excelled in that sports they just stuck with that sport i mean how did how did that
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natural sorting happen yeah that's some of it so that that natural sorting that i i write about that
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the scientists discovered it called the big bang of body types so it's like the body types of
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of athletes who are successful got much much more different from what they used to be it's called the
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big bang because if you if you like plot on a graph that the changes it looks like the expanding
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universe you know with all the galaxies flying away from one another and the way it kind of started
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and like i said some of those some of the changes are are not even that visible like you said you know
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with the muscle fibers some of them are very visible like elite female gymnasts have shrunk from five
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foot three to four foot nine on average over the last 30 years because it makes it easier for them
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to spin so those kind of things are very visible um and i mean the most noticeable one in the nba right
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there's one a little more than one in ten men in the nba are at least seven feet tall but that's
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incredibly rare in the general population so if you know an american man between the ages of 20 and 40
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who's at least seven feet tall there's a 17 chance he's a current nba player that's how rare that is
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but the way it started to happen was was partly i mean honestly for for most of at least international
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sports history the only places competing were like great britain and places the great britain
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had colonized in a serious way and you know the second half of the 20th century sports really opened
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up to the world and what happened in the nba is kind of a microcosm of what happened everywhere so
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1983 the nba strikes an agreement with the players making them partners in the league where they get
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shares of ticket sales television revenue all that kind of stuff and the sport goes global and
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suddenly anyone who can play in the nba wants to because the financial rewards and fame are so
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great and the team starts scouting internationally and all that kind of stuff and overnight overnight
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that was actually the proportion of men in the nba went from five percent to eleven percent in one
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season when they started doing that and then all these other unique body traits started emerging guys
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with like my arms are the same length as my height whereas the average nba player is six six and a
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half with seven foot long arms and so this sort of sort of natural self-selection started happening in
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sports where the body types it took more people got filtered out at lower levels because they didn't
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have the advantages of the specialized body type and kept getting more and more specialized and then
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once it got to a certain level in a lot of sports then people started actually looking for that stuff
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once some of those things you know once we realized we should measure those things like water polo players
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for example their forearm bone is getting longer in relation to their overall arm that it used to be
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because that makes for more forceful throwing whip and the exact opposite is true for rowers so who pull
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stuff toward them and so once people started to realize that these trends were taking place you know
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just by kind of doing physiology on their athletes then they started proactively looking for it
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and it's in some cases been incredibly successful like great britain who hosted the last olympics
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they have um actually they have a woman who just set a world record in rowing who like hadn't rowed
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three years before she won the gold medal at the olympics and they took her physiological measures
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you know they used to come into play by accident now they know specifically so they said you know
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dear this is where you belong interesting i mean even though they're specifically looking for
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certain physiologies and i guess certain genetics are they still sort of squeamish about talking about it
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like openly like yeah we're looking for someone with good genes because you know we have this history
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with eugenics and things like that where people don't like to talk about sort of genetic determinism
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yeah and and it's and and to be honest like the genetics has kind of a bad reputation for i mean
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a rule of thumb i would say is that genetics influence essentially everything but determine very few
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things right so genes there are no results or there are no you know nothing without both genes and
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environment so i don't think people should think about genes in a deterministic way the problem is
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like most of the news they get is like this week there's the gene for this and this week there's
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a gene for promiscuity or for liking chocolate and the fact is 90 of that stuff is actually false
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positives because in some cases the scientists and in most cases the journalists don't know how to
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evaluate the mess of those studies most vicious crap um but yeah no there and i think there's a
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reason reason to be squeamish you know i think when you go to you know you spend some time you know
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with like nfl or nba uh general manager for example and they're not gonna they're they're a
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little less squeamish about saying talent exists even if they don't want to get into genes
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um but in some countries like when i was in australia which has what i think might be the premier
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sports science institute in the world the australian institute of sport they they're one of their
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head physiologists was telling me that in their grant proposals for research because they actually
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fund a lot of sports performance research out there and we don't really do that so much
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um they stopped using the word genetics and instead they would substitute molecular biology
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and protein synthesis which is the exact same thing but they stopped using the word genetics
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because people were viewing it as deterministic and you should pigeonhole someone completely and
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all this kind of thing i mean i think the best approach is since we're learning about this
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this talent of trainability that has a genetic component the best way we can use it instead of
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limiting people's options and say well you have to do this sport so you know you can do whatever you
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want but if you're not getting the experience you want over there just so you know you'd be really
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responsive to training over here you know and that's that's that's in some cases it's already
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being used for sort of exercise for health but i think we do have to be vigilant about not being
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deterministic when it's not appropriate so you have a section that i thought was really fascinating
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the genetic differences between male and female athletes and how that creates different results
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what are the genetic differences and how um do those genetic differences result in different
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athletic performances yeah well the single biggest one so we all kind of we all start life on the on
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the path to being female that's like the default fetus path but you know six weeks in there's a gene
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um on the y chromosome called sry it's actually easy to remember sex determining region y
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gene on on the y chromosome that basically um start the development of these cells that
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you know lead to testosterone and once the testosterone uh starts gushing it starts
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arranging things in a male pattern in a way so even even in the womb men will have a longer
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forearm for example like for throwing then uh or whatever you know men obviously when they're in the
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womb male males um than females and and that's that gets really accentuated through puberty so a lot of
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women actually their athleticism declines through puberty uh so their vertical jump height will go
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down their sprint speed not everyone not the ones who go to the top but but a lot of them
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um because you know they get um fat gets deposited on widened hips things like that you know that that
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angle the the hips and the angle to the knee is why women tear their acl at such an epidemic rate
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meanwhile men are packing in more muscle fibers even if they're not working out even if you don't work
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out during puberty you're going to get more muscle fibers the testosterone causes the creation of red
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blood cells so which are extremely important to endurance more density of bones that can support
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more muscle longer limbs in relation to the body greater height obviously um certain bone structures
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like the structure of the the jaw and the forehead become less susceptible to the kind of punch that
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would knock you out for example and so there's a whole host of traits that are useful for
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athleticism are accentuated in men and in some cases um diminished in women in fact if you look
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at like things that are easy to measure like world track records for kids at nine years old girls and
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boys are identical there's no reason for them to even be competing differently they're they're
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indistinguishable but at 14 they're like a universe apart you can look at things the quarter the record
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for a quarter mile so one lap around outdoor track for nine year old boys and girls is identical and by
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14 it's like five seconds different or something like that you know in a race that's under a minute
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wow so i mean what's amazing in the past you know i'd say half half century women have made great
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strides in athletics because we've gotten over all this sort of silly pseudoscience where that
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yeah we've been engaged in activities their uterus would fall out or like goofy stuff like that
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um it wasn't that long ago that stuff was uh yeah i guess the ski the ski jump that was the thing
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like women couldn't do the the ski jump because like something right that's like that's like one of
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the activities where they're actually like closest to men into interesting well but it was with that
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are while they're getting closer and closer to uh the performance of male elite athletes male
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athletes are still surpassing will there ever be a moment when women will be able to surpass in like an
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elite woman athlete will be able to surpass an elite male athlete or the are the genetics just
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that makes it almost impossible i mean you never know if there's a one-off but as a rule there's not
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going to be that time in the sports that we currently have and in fact that idea that that female athletes
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are catching up is actually not true there was a period where they were catching up and it was
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largely due to the fact that they had not had um opportunities to train and compete very much
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or for the sport to go global and so when women started their rate of progress was really kind of
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startling and if you extrapolated that it looked like they'd beat men in 100 meters in the future
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but now they've actually stagnated and in fact men are opening the gap a little bit and again
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i usually turn to easily measurable sports because you know it's easy to make a concrete example
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um and so if you look in running for example in from the 100 meters to the ultra marathon the
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difference between if you average the top 10 best men and top 10 best women any given year the
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difference is going to be 11 that's basically what it is what it always is doesn't really close
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um and it just kind of sticks there and in fact men are a little bit inching away and i think part
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of that's because of this this mega doping era that set women's records kind of out of sight
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unfortunately so a lot of them are just stuck because those drugs are much more efficacious
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in women than they are men and so some of those records are stuck in the past so but there are
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sports like in in long distance swimming women come within six percent of men you know i think if we
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again ski jump is one where lightness is prized and women do really well i think if we tailored
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more sports to use fine motor skills that's something where women you know tend to outperform
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men but we we just have not really arranged sports around those i think maybe we need some more sports
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you know so i think we'll see more high level women more you know maybe we'll have some more sports
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that that cater to things that women are better at um but in terms of the elite elite performances
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the gap's actually not closing at all interesting so another kind of controversial aspect of
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genetics and sports is race um and so you talk about so jamaica is known for their sprinters
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yeah and uh you there's a theory out there that's like with the warrior slave theory
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um how did the the jamaican's historical genetic past affect their ability to produce such
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world-class sprinters today yeah so that that warrior slave theory i i didn't i i grew up
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you know i got into track when i was young because i grew up running with jamaican guys um and
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you're always curious to go there and didn't didn't realize until i went there that there's
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this theory on the island that this this autonomous region where a group called the maroons live they
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were these kind of uh warrior slaves who who fought their way away from their masters and secluded
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themselves in this very treacherous area of the island um and and they just by being fierce they won
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their freedom 100 years before official emancipation and a lot of the great sprinters are
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from that region that's like usain bolt right over the hill you know woman a woman who's um been
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winning a lot of uh she won a couple world championships in the 100 meters is also right
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from that region and so the people in that region kind of claim them and say you know they're part of
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our lineage we were the strongest of of and uh fiercest and all these people are from our genetic
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stock but when i looked at the i went there with a geneticist um and he collected data and and so
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far the data does not look like that's the case um the maroons look very very mixed like other jamaicans
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are um so i don't so so far i think um you know the evidence is against that that that story even
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though it's a really nice story um but but there's some evidence that for more broadly people from
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that region so since 1980 every man who's been olympic 100 meter final we boycotted the olympics
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in 1980 um has whether they're from portugal um you know england canada jamaica america they all
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have some ancestry in this one tiny area on the coast of west africa um and that area happens to be
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like the highest malaria danger zone in the world and there's evidence in the book that i talk about
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that that a possible trade-off for protection from malaria um causes kind of a shift to a more
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explosive physiology or more fast twitch muscle fibers in people from that area and of course
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that's where uh we wrenched people from their homes and brought them to the united states were from that
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area um and so you know the people from that area you also you they basically disappear in
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international competition above the half mile so they're disadvantaged for endurance sports but
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but just on average you know just shifts the curve a little bit but that makes a big deal for
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people at the end of the curve um you're probably going to find more of them or advantage for
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explosive sports and again it's not to say that that european people or white people in america
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can't have that physiology it's just it's just less common when you're only looking for the few best
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people in the world that being less common can matter a lot so you uh talk about iditarod dogs
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you have a chapter about these iditarod dogs and this guy who brent you really read this thing thoroughly
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yeah i know it was a great book so there's this guy zoro um who wasn't like a really fast dog but he
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was like a hard-working dog and uh this breeder just bred him bred dogs for hard working and i thought
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it was really interesting because like okay yeah again like i'm not an athlete a natural athlete but
00:22:48.040
i always kind of had this chip on my shoulder like well if i work hard enough i got the determination i
00:22:52.380
got heart right so i can like make it up for that and i like that idea because it's sort of like it was
00:22:58.640
in my control right my effort was in my control and my determination was in my control but now
00:23:03.660
there's research saying that genetics influences or might influence our determination too or our grit
00:23:09.580
that's right and and so and again this is this is where we should remember that genetics influence
00:23:15.340
is just about everything but doesn't determine almost anything um but the that's right so i knew
00:23:20.900
for example when i was going into researching a book that like training we do impacts our dopamine
00:23:26.460
system you know the system involved in pleasure and reward for whatever sex food drugs whatever
00:23:30.860
in in the brain and but i didn't know that there's a large body of work that shows the reverse is true
00:23:36.180
too like the way that our dopamine system is set up actually has a lot to do with what we're going
00:23:40.960
to feel pleasure doing if that's a certain kind of physical activity or whatever and in these dogs
00:23:45.660
what happened was the speeds of iditarod dogs plateaued after not that you know after not that long
00:23:52.940
of breeding and so i wrote about this guy lance mackie who'd been like a drug addict was really down
00:23:57.700
and out but his his father had helped invent the iditarod and one at once and he wanted to do it
00:24:02.660
so he got himself together and started getting dogs he couldn't he couldn't afford you know the ones
00:24:07.320
that were bred to be the fastest and they were plateauing anyway so he just went for these ones
00:24:11.340
that would never stop going like that he you know he had to chain them to get them to stop and if he
00:24:17.180
you know he tried to stop the sled like he could hardly do it unless he you know dug spikes into the
00:24:21.800
snow and things like that so he started breeding um for those kinds of dogs who just wanted to
00:24:27.140
always go and then he won the iditarod four times in a row and so then everybody started copying that
00:24:33.020
strategy and now it's now it's a dog strategy like you're not going for the fastest dogs in fact there
00:24:37.660
there's been some genetic analysis and you can breed in certain dog breeds to make your dogs have
00:24:43.520
like a greater desire or more motivation and some of what's happening their dopamine system is very
00:24:47.680
similar to things we see in humans and one thing one thing i regret in the book is using the phrase
00:24:53.540
one of the scientists saying there is such a thing as couch potato jeans because while that's kind of
00:24:58.860
true it's you know occasionally people have asked me they said oh so so there really is a reason like i
00:25:04.640
don't have to get up and exercise and that's first of all where's that going to get you you know do you
00:25:08.760
really want justification for you know not being healthy or not being athletic no it means you know anyone
00:25:14.700
who's ever been in the training group like i was a i was a division one runner and you know there
00:25:19.120
there are people you train with there guys you train with some of whom have to be managed to train more
00:25:22.960
a lot of them and some of whom have to be managed to train less because they'll overdo it and so
00:25:27.620
you know i think most people have been in the training group know that intuitively we just never
00:25:31.400
think about where that comes from and so for the people who don't have that zorro like you know
00:25:36.220
motivation to get up and move i think um those people just have to work on manipulating their
00:25:40.680
environment a little more whether that's with a training group or finding activity they like or
00:25:44.480
or whatever it is you know it's not it's not a reason to give up yeah i also should say coming
00:25:49.820
out of that research it did make me when i was looking at some of the research on mice who have
00:25:53.860
a high drive to be active and then you can give them like ritalin they stop moving around it is a
00:25:58.700
little bit scary because you think about hyperactivity in kids and it's basically a drive to move around
00:26:02.600
and you can give them a medication and then they won't move around as much i'm not sure that's necessarily
00:26:06.540
a good thing in all cases right because you want them to pay attention but we also want them to move around
00:26:10.560
yeah yeah you even kind of made the case that we're might we might be creating you know like
00:26:15.900
might be contributing to the obesity obesity epidemic amongst young people because we're
00:26:20.080
giving those drugs so they sit still it's exactly what you see in these mice when they're bred to
00:26:24.680
basically be crackheads for physical activity like you can breed them really easily to like be just
00:26:29.640
voracious runners where and then if you take them away they get depressed if you don't allow them to
00:26:35.200
do their exercise but then you can give them these drugs and and then they're cool with not exercising anymore
00:26:39.860
so what what are the ethical issues that that come up with all this new athletic uh gene research i
00:26:49.600
mean are teams sports organizations starting to use genetic testing to figure out whether they should
00:26:55.060
sign a player or whether they should you know tell us the player well you know thanks but we're gonna
00:27:00.660
we'll pay you a little bit but you can't play um what's going on there yeah i mean there are
00:27:06.460
so sports teams are always using genetic information they're just not looking at genes
00:27:11.740
right like whether they're measuring people's physiology which is better because that's a
00:27:15.300
combination of your genes and your environment um but there are some kind of more actual looking
00:27:21.040
at genes starting like i know the kazakhstan's olympic committee decided they were going to start
00:27:25.120
screening kids for certain genes but i i've seen some aspects of their program and it's basically
00:27:30.160
nonsense what they're going to do is they're going to look at these genes that matter but have
00:27:33.200
really small effect and you'd be better off like using a stopwatch or a bench press or something
00:27:36.760
like that um but the way where it is working in is for things that are related to like injury and
00:27:43.300
illness so there are there are genes that are related to uh the strength of collagens which are
00:27:48.940
kind of like quote unquote the body's glue and so people have certain versions are more likely to
00:27:53.320
tear tendons and ligaments and so people being identified in that way maybe they can do what
00:27:57.600
what some of these exercise geneticists are now calling pre-habilitation like strengthening to reduce the
00:28:02.900
chance of those injuries um there's a gene we know that is influences the ability to recover from
00:28:08.700
brain trauma so pretty relevant to things like boxing nma and of course football um and obviously
00:28:15.460
the most important thing is getting hit in the head for brain damage but some people are more
00:28:19.820
susceptible and less and take longer to recover and so on so forth at the very first brain that
00:28:25.060
the researchers at bu you know have made a lot of headlines for dissecting brains of x nfl players
00:28:29.980
the first one they ever did had two versions of this gene only two percent of the population have
00:28:34.320
that and so they're just not as likely to get over brain injury um there there have been questions
00:28:39.340
in in new york in 2002 actually the medical commission that licenses boxers thought about
00:28:45.660
requiring it and then decided that they couldn't you know it was too too ethically fraught basically um
00:28:51.400
and and some years ago the the chicago bulls actually tested when they got eddie curry they thought
00:28:57.960
he might have this this genetic heart condition that could cause him to drop dead on the court
00:29:01.400
and so they they screened him for it um decided they thought he had it he wouldn't submit to a
00:29:07.780
genetic test they said okay if you have this this a gene for this we'll give you i think it was
00:29:12.900
four hundred thousand dollars a year for like the next 40 years but we won't let you play anymore
00:29:16.720
and he refused to take the test and they traded him based on that based on his non-willingness to
00:29:21.940
take a genetic test and so that was kind of an interesting precedent there but but would not be
00:29:26.140
allowed again today because of legislation to protect genetic information from your employer
00:29:29.920
that's been introduced interesting what about for just not not high at performing athletes but like
00:29:36.040
parents who have kids right as i was reading this um i have a four-year-old and he's about to get that
00:29:42.160
age we're gonna start playing sports you know what do you tell your kid who's like i want to be a
00:29:47.300
professional football player and you know you know your genetic history you're like oh you know i don't
00:29:53.680
know if that's really in the picture for you and they you know or parents who spend lots and
00:29:58.540
i live in you know suburban tulsa it's sort of affluent parents will send their kids to football
00:30:03.300
camps for you know it costs lots of money and their kids aren't probably going to play d1 football
00:30:08.360
they might not even play start on the high school football team here what do what do parents do i mean
00:30:14.220
how with this idea that genetics does is not deterministic but it plays a role for sure is there anything
00:30:19.980
we can do to like help our kids like still enjoy athletics but still keep their expectations real
00:30:25.340
or should we even should we not even attempt to keep their expectations real let them dream
00:30:29.320
yeah i mean it's it's like you said genetics certainly plays a role um i did some rough analytics that
00:30:36.160
you know i i that but anyway some very ballpark analytics that pro the children of pro athletes were
00:30:44.060
about 55 times more likely to get an ncaa scholarship in some sport even if it wasn't the sport of their
00:30:49.540
parent played so there's you know presumably something being passed down there in terms of
00:30:53.340
athleticism and honestly i think i've been big i added an afterword to the book about specialization
00:30:58.160
in youth sports because it's completely backfiring actually so it turns out that the best way to
00:31:03.900
develop uh elite athletes not the exclusive way but the best way is like the roger federer path or the
00:31:10.060
steven ash path where you play a whole bunch of different sports you don't even i mean steven ash didn't
00:31:13.980
even own a basketball to his 13 federer's parents forced him to keep playing badminton soccer
00:31:18.520
basketball before he could focus in on tennis and that's actually the norm and so i think the
00:31:22.960
piece of advice i'd give parents because i don't i don't want to discourage kids dreams is one let the
00:31:28.200
kids have their dreams right obviously we know there are a lot of parents who i think are well
00:31:31.080
intentioned but are really playing out their dream yeah um and give the kids what's called a sampling
00:31:36.760
period because elite athletes have that so they're going to be elite it's more likely if they have that
00:31:41.200
it's also a lot more likely they'll find the sport that fits their talents and one that they like
00:31:45.360
so basically i would i would say allow them to develop the dream and and give them that sampling
00:31:51.460
period because the pro athletes have it but the problem now is that there are people who run a lot
00:31:56.640
of leagues and travel teams and camps and aau and everything whose economic interests are in
00:32:03.880
conflict with giving kids the sampling period that produces elite athletes and in fact this canadian
00:32:09.600
research named john cote has this really interesting research showing that the the odds of becoming a pro
00:32:15.000
athlete in any sport based on the size of your hometown has all gone down to really small hometown
00:32:19.320
sizes because the kids in the big towns have to specialize too early just to like make a middle
00:32:24.520
school team you know yeah and so with these good intentions have really backfired so i'm a big
00:32:29.500
proponent of the sampling period that's great yeah that's what it's like here and i live right next
00:32:34.700
to a suburb called jinx oklahoma it produces one of the top football teams and like they start
00:32:39.460
the kids on like the high school football program when like they're in kindergarten there's like a
00:32:43.240
a draft period like the kids get drafted and it's kind of it's pretty nuts so um if it made better
00:32:50.840
athletes ultimately you know i'd kind of be for it but that's like not what most of the evidence i
00:32:54.560
think the i think the evidence on golf is out actually juries out nobody's done like a good job
00:32:58.600
studying it but for most sports uh you know the australian institute of sport did some fascinating
00:33:03.540
research where they showed that kids who play three different anticipatory sports those are sports
00:33:09.100
where you have to react faster than your biology can so you have to learn visual cues like in
00:33:13.280
you know in football or in soccer or in basketball volleyball attacking sports basically they will
00:33:18.800
then pick up any subsequent sport like that much more quickly than people who've only played one
00:33:22.740
interesting well david epstein where can people learn more about your work
00:33:25.780
uh well definitely the the book the sports gene uh the website sportsgene.com but i haven't been
00:33:31.380
updating it lately and i'm always you know shooting my mouth off on twitter so that's one way
00:33:35.380
awesome well david epstein thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure thank you
00:33:39.060
pleasure is mine our guest today was david epstein he's the author of the book the sports dean
00:33:42.820
inside the science of extraordinary athletic performance and you can find that on amazon.com
00:33:47.120
and bookstores everywhere well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:33:54.840
for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:33:58.320
art of manliness.com and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly