“What Makes a Champion? Early Multidisciplinary Practice, Not Early Specialization, Predicts World-Class Performance”, 2021-07-14 (; similar):
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 (eg. pickup games) in the athlete’s respective main sport and in other sports.
Analyses revealed that (1) 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; (2) 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 (3) 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.
…On the other hand, Sir Chris Hoy, the most successful racing cyclist of all time, did not start track cycling until age 17 and won his first gold medal at age 26 (2017). College basketball player Donald Thomas started practicing the high jump at age 22 and became world champion in the high jump at age 23 (2007). Furthermore, athletes widely regarded as the greatest of all time in their sports, Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Phelps, and Sir Chris Hoy, all played a diverse range of sports throughout childhood and adolescence rather than specializing in their main sport at an early age (2019; 2017; 2014; 2017; 2020).
…This research focused on sports, but analogous findings have been reported for at least one nonathletic domain: science. 2015 [Die Wissenschaftselite Deutschlands: Sozialprofil und Werdegänge zwischen 1945 und 2013] examined the biographies of the 48 German Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, economy, and medicine/physiology since 1945. 42 had multidisciplinary study and/or working experiences. Compared with winners of the Leibnitz prize—Germany’s highest national science award—Nobel laureates were less likely to have won a scholarship as a student and took statistically-significantly longer to earn full professorships and to achieve their award. Taken together, the observations suggest that early multidisciplinary practice is associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.
We propose 3 interrelated hypotheses.
The first is the sustainability hypothesis: Childhood/adolescent participation in multiple sports is associated with a lower risk of later overuse injury and burnout (for reviews, see et al 2018; et al 2020).
World-class senior athletes may have reached that level in part because they were less encumbered by injury or burnout ( et al 2018; et al 2017).
The second is the multiple-sampling-and-functional-matching hypothesis: The focus on one main sport emerges from an athlete’s experiences in multiple sports, which increases the odds that an athlete will select a sport at which he or she is particularly talented (2017; 2014).
Athletes who engage in multiple sports during early athletic development are more likely to find the sport that best matches their talents and preferences. Athletes who discover their optimal sports match are more likely to be world-class athletes than if they select and focus on a less-than-optimal sports match.
A minority of athletes became senior world-class athletes despite specializing early. According to this hypothesis, those few successful early-specializing athletes likely either selected their optimal sport without sampling by luck or were talented in multiple sports, one of which was their selected sport.
The third is the transfer-as-preparation-for-future-learning (PFL) hypothesis: More varied earlier learning experiences facilitate later long-term domain-specific skill learning and refinement (1999; 2017).
The PFL hypothesis corresponds to central tenets of general learning theory (1999) and of self-organization of complex systems according to ecological-dynamics theory ( et al 2010; et al 2012). The PFL hypothesis rests on 2 premises.
One is that amplified variation in learning tasks and situations may facilitate athletes’ ability to adapt their intentions and perceptual and motor actions in learning. For example, practicing broader ranges of skills and experiencing varied practice drills, conditioned game formats, or varying coach-athlete interaction may provide the learner enhanced opportunities to adapt to different coaching styles, adapt their attentional focus or the intention for specific actions (eg. to dribble, pass, or shoot in game situations).
The other premise is that experience of greater variation in learning methodologies may provide an athlete with enhanced opportunities to understand the principles that lead to individually more or less effective learning, which facilitates the development of the elite athlete’s competencies for self-regulation in learning (for review, see 2015). At the same time, experience of more varied learning methodologies may also increase the probability of encountering particularly functional individual learning solutions (ie. an intraindividual-selection effect).
Our second and third hypotheses are supported by the fact that multisport coach-led practice but not youth-led play in various sports facilitated long-term senior performance.
In addition, all 3 hypotheses are supported by 2 specific findings from several previous studies (2014a, 2018b; 2014; et al 2017, et al 2019; et al 2013; et al 2016; et al 2011). First, multiple studies suggest a delayed, moderator effect, such that childhood/adolescent other-sports practice facilitates later efficiency of practice in one’s main sport during adulthood—performance improvement per invested practice time. Second, this developmental advantage is not the result of better physical/physiological development but rather improved perceptual-motor learning.
The hypotheses may also explain the converse predictor effects on junior performance. The highest junior-age performers mostly exhibited a highly specialized childhood/adolescent participation pattern that likely compromised the sustainability of their subsequent development into adulthood. They were more likely hampered by later overuse injury or burnout, the choice of their focus sport was more likely suboptimal, and the narrowed range of learning experiences likely limited their opportunities to expand their potential for future learning.
This background helps explain why the populations of successful juniors and of successful seniors are not identical but are partly distinct populations: Most successful juniors do not become successful seniors, whereas most of the successful seniors were not as successful in former junior competitions (see Method). Taken together, an early-specialization pattern may reinforce rapid success through junior age but displays reduced sustainability in that it limits an athlete’s potential for subsequent long-term improvement.