Yuri Verkhoshansky, professor, coach, and the “Father of Plyometrics”, described the main determinants of athletic success as:

 

Motor Potential: 

 

“...the total quantity of mechanical work that can be produced by the human body’s motor system while performing certain movements.”

 

• How much force can the athlete produce?

• How quickly can they produce it?

 

and 

 

Technical Mastery: 

 

“The athlete’s ability to effectively express their motor potential in competition…”

 

• How well does the athlete coordinate the application of force in their sport-specific movements to make the most out of their motor potential? 

 

What techniques do they use to

• throw

• jump

• tackle

or 

• run

 

In the book Mastery by Robert Greene, he says,

 

“In the stories of the greatest masters, past and present, we can inevitably detect a phase in their lives in which all of their future powers were in development, like the chrysalis of a butterfly.”
 

You’re in school and you’ve just entered your first typing class. The teacher asks you to type out the paragraph on the board as quickly as possible. You’ve never typed on a keyboard before so you have to look down to find each letter and only click once you find the one you need. 

 

It takes you 3 minutes to complete the paragraph.

 

The next day, the teacher starts class with the same task. Type out the paragraph on the board. It’s still difficult, but not as much as the day before. You are able to complete the task in less time.

​

This goes on for the entire year. 

​

By the final day of class, you don’t even need to look down at the keyboard to type the words on the board. 

 

Instead of 3 minutes, it now takes you 30 seconds to complete the paragraph.

 

In that year, you didn’t get faster fingers or quicker eyes. You always had the potential to type the paragraph in 30 seconds. What you didn’t have was an understanding of how to do it.

​

In the beginning, skills and coordination must be learned.

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Our technical mastery is the limiter that decides how much of our motor potential we can apply to our sport-specific movements. Imagine you had a goal of sprinting a faster 40-yard dash. So, to reach that goal you began doing a ton of heavy weightlifting. Heavy weightlifting would definitely be beneficial to enhancing your short-distance sprinting performance. The issue here is that heavy weightlifting was all you did for your training. You didn't sprint at all. Sprinting, like any sport-specific movement (jumping, tackling, throwing, etc) is a skill, it must be learned and mastered. Without the practiced skill to sprint, any training that does not involve developing the skill to sprint will prove to be insufficient. 

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Without the knowledge of how to type, improvements in finger speed won't translate to paragraphs being completed in less time. Rather, an improved ability to coordinate your fingers around the keyboard to type the words on the board will be much more impactful. Without the knowledge of how to sprint, any changes in strength and power won't translate well to your speed. A study actually found that the technical ability to apply forces in the sprint was more important than the total forces that athletes were applying when comparing slower versus faster sprinters. I'd take a bet that this is true for any sport-specific movement. The better your technique and coordination for the movement the better you will complete the movement.

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The better we get at doing a movement. The higher our technical mastery for that movement will become meaning the more effective we will be in the movement. When you first start playing a sport, your technical mastery in the movements of that sport is low.

​

Practices of those movements have to be accumulated to learn how to

• tackle harder

• run faster

• throw further

or

• jump higher

​

With years of practice, you gain a greater ability to use your motor potential because of your improved understanding of how to perform your sport-specific movements.

 

By reaching a high level of technical mastery, you’ll be able to perform near your maximum potential. The best athletes have the greatest understanding of how to accomplish their sport-specific movements. 

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“The path of mastering something is the combination of not only doing the best you can do at it, but also doing it the best it can be done.” - Gary Keller, The One Thing

 

Yuri Verkhoshansky states, 

​

“...we can deduce that for elite athletes able to fully use their motor potential, further increases in sport results can be achieved mainly by increasing their motor potential.” 

 

Going on to say,

 

“...to increase the athlete’s motor potential, it is necessary to increase the force-generating capacity of the muscles involved in the execution of competition exercise.” 

​

Athletes must train the muscles most often used in their sport to enhance

• how much force we can produce (strength training)

• how quickly we can produce it (plyometric training)

and, for athletes where endurance is a factor…

• how long we can compete before being overcome by fatigue (endurance training)

​

Even with the mastery of skill and coordination, athletes will still be limited by their motor potential. We all have a ceiling over how much force we can produce, how quickly we can produce it, and how often we can produce it again. A more technical fighter will still fall to an opponent whose punch is much more powerful. A more skilled wrestler will still lose if they can't match the strength and speed of their opponent.

 

With the right training methods, we can continuously raise our strength, speed, and power ceiling. Athletes must train to 

• tackle harder

• run faster

• jump higher

and

• have more endurance

 

Some athletes have a higher technical mastery than others. Some athletes have a higher motor potential. Elite athletes are superior in both. The secret to elite athleticism is consistent practice and effective training. The best athletes in the world have practiced and trained to become masters of their specific sport at the peaks of their potential. 

 

Even then, they still practice and train for more.

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01-12-2022