The purpose of this article is to give my commentary, and insight into a journal article that was published in the Journal of Human Kinetics in December 2020 which sparked quiet a lot of thought within myself and the landscape of South African sprinting.

The journal article titled World-Class Sprinters’ Careers: Early Success Does Not Guarantee Success at Adult Age by Boccia, et al., (2020), quantified how many of the top 50 ranked U18 sprinters succeeded to become top 50 ranked senior sprinters using the World Athletics database from 1998 to 2018 across the Youth (U18), Junior (U20) and Senior toplists in the 100m, 200m and 400m events. In the study the authors created four sub-groups to distinguish the athletes according to their top 50 status in their careers: the Only U18 Group, the Only Senior Group, the U18 and Senior Group and the Others Group (those who never appeared in the top 50). Briefly, the significant results of this study, relevant to the purpose of this article, concluded that the Only U18 Group did NOT show any more significant improvements in performance from the age of about 19/20 years old whereas in the Only Senior Group, performances improved up to 26/27 years old. The Only Senior Group showed a greater annual change of improvement from the ages of 16-19 years old compared to the Only U18 Group and only 17% of males and 21% of females who were top 50 U18 athletes successfully transition to be top 50 Senior athletes; that gives us an attrition rate of 79-83%!

Now we are getting to the point of this article and how it ties into South Africa. The various reasons the authors listed for what COULD BE the cause of such a high attrition rate were early maturation, early specialization, relative age effect, injuries, drop out, and dual career barriers. What I would like to touch on from a Strength & Conditioning/coaching standpoint is the early specialization. Apart from the obvious concept we all know about early specialization and ensuring kids are not playing only one sport as they go through the schooling system etc., how much do we really know about and are aware of early specialization within our daily, weekly, monthly programming? In S&C we can pair this with the concept of the Transfer of Training: which is basically training/developing different exercises/movements over time and hoping that it transfers to improve the athlete’s performance in his or her event/sport.

To vividly explain exactly how transfer in sport works, I’m going to use an analogy from JB Morin via Keir Wenham-Flatt; he said, When a tube of toothpaste is new, you can press on it in any direction with any amount of force and toothpaste will come out, however as time (months & years) goes by you going to have to press on that same tube harder and at specific angles just to get the same amount of toothpaste out of it.

This analogy can be overlayed directly on transfer in sport, where in the beginning you could do just about anything with a young athlete and positive transfer to sport will most likely occur because they are sensitive to the S&C stimulus, it’s all new. However with an older/more experienced athlete, they’re not so sensitive to just any S&C stimulus, thus they need specific intervention to get the same positive transfer they had when they were younger. Sounds easy enough, right?

Well no not really, and allow me to explain. From what I’ve observed, we have a tendency to want to get the most out of our athletes as soon as possible when they show us a glimpse of magic, and one of the most common methods to do this is to implement more sport specific exercises in our programmes or advancing the athlete on to more “adult designed” track workouts to maintain the perceived “edge” we have and also believing that if we can get our youth/junior athletes close to the level of our seniors then we are doing an exceptional job because most of the world believes that early success breeds later career success.

That’s not the case and quite dangerous for two reasons: according to the study I highlighted in the beginning by Boccia, et al., (2020), the results revealed a number of eye opening conclusions of which some we are quite aware of and others not so much; (1) being a young elite sprinter is not a prerequisite to be an elite adult sprinter, (2) entering high level/senior competition early does not constitute as an advantage for reaching elite performance in your event and (3) the Only U18 Group showed a blunted annual rate of improvement across the age timeline compared to the Only Senior group.

For the second reason, let’s go back to the example I made of the sport specific exercises and “adult designed” track workouts. If the simple workouts/exercises are working early in that athlete’s career, then my observation is that we should not feel the need to level up to more specific exercises UNTIL those simple workouts/exercises stop working. The basic reason for this can be explained in the form of another quote via Keir by Anatoliy Bondarchuk and he said, if you introduce specific, more advanced exercises too early, then you are robbing them twice. Once because you are exposing the athlete to an exercise they have not earned the right to use and twice because when you actually do need it later in the athlete’s career you’ve already desensitized them to that exercise and thus you won’t get as much transfer as you were hoping for.

Furthermore, to give you perspective on what the descriptive statistics of this study revealed about these sampled athletes who received a top 50 ranking in the Only U18 Group, the age they were at the time of their personal best (100m) and the age of their first and last appearance on any WA 100m toplist is as follows:

All values are 90% CI
Men
Age of first appearance – 15.16 to 15.74 years old
Personal Peak Performance – 10,19s to 10,25s @ 19.19 to 20.55 years old
Age of last appearance – 21.37 to 23.39 years old

Women
Age of first appearance – 14.39 to 15.08 Years old
Personal Peak Performance – 11,24s to 11,31s @ 19.27 to 20.85 years old
Age of last appearance – 22.14 to 24.29 years old

With all of that being said, as practitioners and coaches we need to be extremely cautious when prescribing and progressing programmes/workouts for our youth athletes as well as some senior athletes with a low training age i.e. First year studentathletes. We need to allow athletes to develop chronologically and not according to the stopwatch and whichever shoe deal we can sign ASAP, if we want these athletes to have longer senior careers. Does this mean that we should frown upon extraordinary youth/junior performances? Absolutely not, we will always have anomalies and they need to be celebrated too but our aim in my opinion should be to steadily develop the athlete and not expect adult performances from youth/junior athletes; slow cooked, not a flash in the pan.

I trust that this was thought provoking enough for everyone reading this, please feel free to engage with me on all my social media platforms and email, lets create change that benefits our future.

References:
Boccia, G., Cardinale, M., & Brustio, P. R. (2020). World-Class Sprinters' Careers: Early Success Does Not Guarantee Success at Adult Age. International journal of sports physiology and performance, 16(3), 367–374.
www.doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2020-0090

Keir Wenham-Flatt Commentary, Strength Coach Network 2020
www.strengthcoachnetwork.com