Perhaps not the base, but is it possible that all that training at a young age may have produced physiological changes to the body that can later be tapped into even years or decades afterward?
We, the real Dr. Q and myself, had this discussion last night at dinner. She started on your side.
Here is my case.Take two swimmers, Q who swam in high school for a few year and is considered a decent, but never an exceptional, swimmer by most standards and P, who swam from knee high through a top division 1 program, swimming at the top levels of the sport for most of those years and suffered the training that went along with being at the top.
Q's maximum capacity for any of the physiological measurements that matter to swimming and can be adjusted by training would be less than P's.
Now P and Q are buds and train together at a typical masters team, getting in 3 or 4, 3-4k workouts a week. They are both fast for their team, the train in the same lane, but P is faster than Q, but Q is still not racing as fast as he did in high school.
Given that P and Q are doing the same workouts, and Q is racing below his high school peak, that would imply that Q is also conditioned below his maximum "physiological measures that matter to swimming" (PMTM).
If Q still has the capacity to improve PMTM, and P's PMTM maximums are greater than Q's, than that really just means P has more potential. Q is closer to the max already.
Is summary, elites might have more potential than non elites physiologically, but that doesn't matter because no masters are training at the level that would max out their full physiological potential.
Perhaps not the base, but is it possible that all that training at a young age may have produced physiological changes to the body that can later be tapped into even years or decades afterward?
We, the real Dr. Q and myself, had this discussion last night at dinner. She started on your side.
Here is my case.Take two swimmers, Q who swam in high school for a few year and is considered a decent, but never an exceptional, swimmer by most standards and P, who swam from knee high through a top division 1 program, swimming at the top levels of the sport for most of those years and suffered the training that went along with being at the top.
Q's maximum capacity for any of the physiological measurements that matter to swimming and can be adjusted by training would be less than P's.
Now P and Q are buds and train together at a typical masters team, getting in 3 or 4, 3-4k workouts a week. They are both fast for their team, the train in the same lane, but P is faster than Q, but Q is still not racing as fast as he did in high school.
Given that P and Q are doing the same workouts, and Q is racing below his high school peak, that would imply that Q is also conditioned below his maximum "physiological measures that matter to swimming" (PMTM).
If Q still has the capacity to improve PMTM, and P's PMTM maximums are greater than Q's, than that really just means P has more potential. Q is closer to the max already.
Is summary, elites might have more potential than non elites physiologically, but that doesn't matter because no masters are training at the level that would max out their full physiological potential.
