Deliberate Practice - Expertise IS in our GENES!

The long held belief that outstanding performance was a result of innate ability has now been replaced by beliefs about the role of intensive deliberate practice.   Why then has there been such a seismic shift away from previously held views regarding the crucial role of innate talent in the developemnt of expertise?

The answer to this question is central to the Ericssons theory of deliberate practice and can be explained by the mediating role of 'gene expression' during the transformation from one level of performance to the next. During this process dormant genes are actively selected (called in to action) as a result of intense and extended practice - in other words the mechanisms of the body, through training, adapt to meet the demands that are being placed on them.

Under these circumstances the superior capacities (physiological and cognitive) exhibited by experts and previously thought to be innate, in fact result from rather than cause the development of expertise. It is therefore not unrealistic to suggest that all healthy individuals have inherited the potential to reach expert levels of performance, as the necessary genes appear to reflect genes contained within all individuals’ DNA.

For example endurance athletes routinely experience hypertrophy in the left ventricular of the heart which speeds up the flow of blood to meet their increased need for oxygen (see below).

hypertrophy in the left ventricular (botton right) of the heart

Another example of adaptation to training and its mediating role in the development of expertise is that of professional musicians. A professional key board player can produce 1800 notes per minute with precision of space and time that is unsurpassed in any other type of human behavior. This is possible because professional musicians’ develop quicker nerve conduction due to the enlargement of myelin cells - this specifically occurs during training activities that require rapid information transfer and temporal precision.
 

In applying this thinking to the development of expertise in golf involves the following: firstly the qualities that allow experts reproduce superior performance in a representative context needs to be identified. Experts often fail to outperform non experts in closed context controlled tasks. Experts, then, are distinguishable from non experts by their ability to perform under the many constraints that affect performance at an elite level. Only once you have learned how they acquired these skills can you go about designing training activities that lead to superior performance in golf.

References

Ericsson, K.A (2003) “How the Expert Performance Approach Differs from Traditional approaches to Expertise in Sport” in Starkes, J.L & Ericsson K.A (Eds), Expert Performance in Sports, Champaign, IL, Human Kinetics

Ericsson, K, A; Nandagopal, K and Roring, R,W (2009) Toward a Science of Exceptional Achievement: Attaining Superior Performance through Deliberate Practice Longevity, Regeneration, and Optimal Health 2009 New York Academy of Science  1172: 199–217

Gruber, H; Jansen, P; Marienhagen, J and Altenmueller, E (2010) Adaptations During the Acquisition of Expertise, Talent Development & Excellence of Expertise, Vol. 2, No. 1, 3-15

Münte, T, F;  Altenmüller, E and  Jäncke, L (2003)”The musician’s brain as a model of neuroplasticity”,  Neuro Science Volume 3  473

Stewart, L. (2008) Do musicians have different brains? Clinical Medicine, 8, 304–308.