You talented folks, have a very hard time understanding this concept of genetic limitation.
What I am simply suggesting here is that what you do at early age (certainly between 10 and 21) probably pushes your genetic limitation. At later age, aerobic capacity potential will be higher, mental strength (which can often confused with genetic limitation) too, everything.
Base established between age 10 and 21 becomes part of your athletic legacy. Belongs to you forever. What you did in the last five years contributes a lot to your actual performances, I agree with you. But what you did in the first 5 years also contributes to it, still today.
It seems to me that 3 related variable are being conflated here:
-- Performance. You seem to be using performance (eg, ability of a 50-yo to do a 40k TT in under an hour) as evidence of a "base" that developed at an early age and never died.
-- Good genetics. One way of describing this is that people who are blessed need less base to achieve a given performance level.
-- Base: as you put it, "the amount of work that one can routinely perform (Chronic Training Load)." There is probably some genetic component to this but I largely think of it as an adaptation brought about through training. Anyone -- of any talent level -- can probably adapt to a weekly training load of (say) 40,000 yards of swimming. They may not be as fast at that training as a very gifted individual, or gain the same benefit from it, but they can achieve the same base. (In any event, surely it is nice to partition performance modeling in terms of parameters that we cannot control -- good genes, for example -- and things we can, like training?)
I have no doubt that genetics plays a huge role in performance (as does training, of course, and not just by changing the base...which is partly what started all this).
I also don't doubt that early hard training can cause various physiological changes that never disappear. But I don't believe that base -- as I understand that term -- is one of them. But the way this problem is defined, it is going to be difficult to settle the question between good genes and an early indestructible base. To all intents in purposes, they are the same thing (ie, we can't do anything about either one at this point.)
We're moving to philosophical matters here.
I think it is important not to try and contain real-word significance within the boundaries of any of these models. The reason for this is that their authors (Banister, Coggan, Skiba) are the first to acknowledge that their models suffer from sever limitation in their ability to represent the complexity of this real world.
Models by their nature (and definition) are all about over-simplification of the "real" world. One possible purpose of a model is predictive: what happens to performance if we change factor X or Y? But another important purpose of a model can be interpretive. In that sense, trying to look at the relationship between real-world variables and model parameters is not just "philosophical."
Unfortunately there is often an inverse relationship between predictive accuracy and model interpretation...so if those authors have models that are both inaccurate at predicting "real" world effects AND also cannot be easily interpreted, what is their purpose?
(This is a genuine question...I admit freely that I am not at all familiar with the models or studies that you and sjstuart seem to be comfortable with.)
But that ancient history just provides the bounds on performance. We all build our base in the same way, we just return to different baselines once we lose it.
This states my position better than I ever did...
Nice discussion -- and I will eventually read it more carefully --though I suspect it is getting more abstract than most would like...I suspect the question most people care about is, "how can I get faster in the (limited) time I have to train?" And, more specifically, if I'm a sprinter, how much base do I need? Thanks to SolarEnergy, who has done a good job addressing this, I think.
You talented folks, have a very hard time understanding this concept of genetic limitation.
What I am simply suggesting here is that what you do at early age (certainly between 10 and 21) probably pushes your genetic limitation. At later age, aerobic capacity potential will be higher, mental strength (which can often confused with genetic limitation) too, everything.
Base established between age 10 and 21 becomes part of your athletic legacy. Belongs to you forever. What you did in the last five years contributes a lot to your actual performances, I agree with you. But what you did in the first 5 years also contributes to it, still today.
It seems to me that 3 related variable are being conflated here:
-- Performance. You seem to be using performance (eg, ability of a 50-yo to do a 40k TT in under an hour) as evidence of a "base" that developed at an early age and never died.
-- Good genetics. One way of describing this is that people who are blessed need less base to achieve a given performance level.
-- Base: as you put it, "the amount of work that one can routinely perform (Chronic Training Load)." There is probably some genetic component to this but I largely think of it as an adaptation brought about through training. Anyone -- of any talent level -- can probably adapt to a weekly training load of (say) 40,000 yards of swimming. They may not be as fast at that training as a very gifted individual, or gain the same benefit from it, but they can achieve the same base. (In any event, surely it is nice to partition performance modeling in terms of parameters that we cannot control -- good genes, for example -- and things we can, like training?)
I have no doubt that genetics plays a huge role in performance (as does training, of course, and not just by changing the base...which is partly what started all this).
I also don't doubt that early hard training can cause various physiological changes that never disappear. But I don't believe that base -- as I understand that term -- is one of them. But the way this problem is defined, it is going to be difficult to settle the question between good genes and an early indestructible base. To all intents in purposes, they are the same thing (ie, we can't do anything about either one at this point.)
We're moving to philosophical matters here.
I think it is important not to try and contain real-word significance within the boundaries of any of these models. The reason for this is that their authors (Banister, Coggan, Skiba) are the first to acknowledge that their models suffer from sever limitation in their ability to represent the complexity of this real world.
Models by their nature (and definition) are all about over-simplification of the "real" world. One possible purpose of a model is predictive: what happens to performance if we change factor X or Y? But another important purpose of a model can be interpretive. In that sense, trying to look at the relationship between real-world variables and model parameters is not just "philosophical."
Unfortunately there is often an inverse relationship between predictive accuracy and model interpretation...so if those authors have models that are both inaccurate at predicting "real" world effects AND also cannot be easily interpreted, what is their purpose?
(This is a genuine question...I admit freely that I am not at all familiar with the models or studies that you and sjstuart seem to be comfortable with.)
But that ancient history just provides the bounds on performance. We all build our base in the same way, we just return to different baselines once we lose it.
This states my position better than I ever did...
Nice discussion -- and I will eventually read it more carefully --though I suspect it is getting more abstract than most would like...I suspect the question most people care about is, "how can I get faster in the (limited) time I have to train?" And, more specifically, if I'm a sprinter, how much base do I need? Thanks to SolarEnergy, who has done a good job addressing this, I think.
