
We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance - marban
http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/we-are-nowhere-close-to-the-limits-of-athletic-performance-rp?ref=hvper.com
======
philwelch
> We find a similar story in the NBA with Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal was the
> first 7-footer in the league who retained the power and agility of a much
> smaller man. Neither a beanpole nor a plodding hulk, he would have been an
> athletic 200-pounder if scaled down to 6 feet in height.

That's not really true. Wilt Chamberlain was taller than Shaq, was a highly
competitive track and field athlete in high school and college, was often the
fastest player _on his NBA team_ , had the strength to pick up or throw around
other NBA players sometimes with just one hand, and had an incredible vertical
leap as well. And, unlike Shaq, he did all this playing every single minute of
every single game.

Like Shaq, however, Wilt Chamberlain's dominance led to rule changes,
including widening the key.

Shaquille O'Neal was undoubtedly more powerful than any other center of his
era, and almost any center of all time with the possible exception of
Chamberlain. He was also relatively lean early in his career, but especially
after he went to the Lakers, he increased his strength and body mass at the
expense of his speed and agility.

~~~
goatlover
Also, Wilt & Shaq are generational outliers that are not in any indicative of
your typical pro athlete. Shaq is a really bad example for the article to use
as indicating any short of progress in sports performance. The current NBA
isn't filled with Shaq-like players. It's guard dominated with a heavy
emphasis on 3 point shooting.

~~~
philwelch
That's a fair point. The current NBA is also incredibly weird and
positionless; the current champions have a shooting guard who is slightly
taller than their power forward and occasional center and a small forward who
is even taller, and there's a generation of young players who are seven feet
tall but have the skill set of point guards and wing players. If anyone is the
predecessor of this style of player, it would be Kevin Durant, who is the
style of lanky seven-footer who has been pushed out of the center position but
developed wing skills to compensate.

The decline of the center position is really weird, though. The emphasis on
three point shooting is driven by analytics--it turns out almost every player
is more efficient shooting threes over midrange shots--so I wonder if a
similar conclusion has been reached about the post game.

------
will_brown
Anyone who hasn't seen the Netflix documentary on Ben Johnson should watch it,
yes he took steroids and got popped for it, come to find out he had been
taking steroids all the time and the tests were easy to beat, the story goes
he only popped positive because Karl Lewis snuck a contact into the testing
room to spike Ben Johnsons water before giving a sample. Have any doubts watch
the documentary and watch Karl Lewis when asked about it and his response, he
doesn't deny it at all and suggests that if that did occur it was fair play.

As to Lewis himself being clean, again watch the documentary there were only
about 2 runners in that era (regularly making the finals) who were clean, the
athletes know better than anyone.

Objectively Lewis was a full grown man and out of no where his jaw grew,
displacing his teeth and he got braces to fix it as an adult. Jaw growth and
braces were indicative of the steroids used at the time in the 80's and was
common place with the track stars, who prior to jaw growth had perfect teeth.

Even in modern times in track what gave Russia's state sponsored doping
program away was the simple fact that non doped athletes would be doubled over
from fatigue at the end of events and the Russians would be smiling not even
out of breath, like the article suggests world class is world class and so
like I suggest the athletes will simply be in the best position to know when
something is out of the norm.

As to Bolt, what makes him special as a sprinter is his size, once thought to
be a detriment (like the article says), but he wasn't/isn't a freak, it is
more along the lines of self fulfilling prophecy. Take Russia and China for
example where they just pluck kids from school who are identified based on
certain physical traits and go into state sponsored athletic training camps.
Moreover, When you were a certain size you were just over looked by everyone
including the coaches and put into different events, now that Bolt has broken
the mold, tons of kids more inline with Bolt's body size are/have been
identified and given the proper support and coaching, so in the near future we
will see more and more sprinters similar to Bolt's measurements. This will
inevitably lead to new world records in the short term without the need for
genetic modification or peds.

~~~
mingabunga
Just to point out, the jaw size increase is from human growth hormone rather
than steroids. I recall seeing photos of members of the Santa Monica track
club athletes (Carl Lewis's club) and 7 out of 9 of their top sprinters had
braces.

~~~
will_brown
I'm to far removed from seeing the documentary, but they went into a little
detail about the history of steroids or peds, and I definitely could be
mistaken but I believe the ped of choice for these sprinters in the 80's was a
horse steroid. Maybe some has watched the same documentary and can clarify.

Either way its obviously a side note and even if my memory serves correct,
that's not to say HGH doesn't have a similar effect.

~~~
icelancer
>horse steroid

They're all "horse steroids," generally, as veterinarians are a common source
of grey/black market AAS. Winstrol was likely very common then, as was Deca-
Durabolin and Trenbolone. Obviously good old-fashioned injectable Testosterone
[insert ester here] was used as well.

As for HGH, I'm not sure it was all that common in the 80s, or really even
now. The benefits for adult males are... dubious, to say the least; it's not
like testosterone which we know how valuable it can be for athletic
performance.

~~~
CuriouslyC
If a tested athlete used any of those compounds in the 80s they would have
been popped for sure. All of those compounds have really long detection
periods.

~~~
icelancer
Watch Icarus or look into any of the state-sponsored avoidance programs. Your
answers lie there.

Also Winstrol and Test Propionate (or Suspension) have short detection times,
HGH didn't have a test until recently, and EPO was in the same boat.

------
eesmith
We seem to be at the limit of the fastest fastball.
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a6063/how-t...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a6063/how-
the-105-mph-fastball-tests-the-limits-of-the-human-body/)

"However, even if the radar gun used last Friday gave Chapman 5 mph, his pitch
still flirted with the maximum speed a human can throw a baseball, which
Fleisig says is about 100 mph. Fleisig has found that adjustments to a
pitcher's biomechanics, as well as better conditioning of the entire kinetic
chain from the legs to the core to the arm, can improve a pitcher's velocity
on his fastball. But he's discovered that as the pitcher approaches 100 mph,
these tweaks and strengthening have diminishing returns.

"Another cause of the 100-mph ceiling owes to this: the amount of torque
needed to throw in excess of the century mark is greater than the amount of
force the ulnar collateral ligament (the elbow ligament Strasburg tore) can
withstand before giving out, according to tests Fleisig has done on cadavers.

An addition quote from
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/sports/baseball/harveys-
in...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/sports/baseball/harveys-injury-shows-
pitchers-have-a-speed-limit.html?pagewanted=all) .

"Fleisig, a biomedical engineer, knows what an arm can handle, and years of
research give him the confidence to answer one of baseball’s more intriguing
questions: Is there a limit to how fast a human being can throw?

"His answer: Yes, there is.

"And, he adds: That limit already has been reached.

"“Oh, there may be an outlier, one exception here or there,” he said. “But for
major league baseball pitchers as a group of elites, the top isn’t going to go
up anymore. With better conditioning and nutrition and mechanics, more
pitchers will be toward that top, throwing at 95 or 100. But the top has
topped out.”"

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Hybrid designer babies, splice in the ligament and fast-twitch muscle genes
from a Cheetah.

This will work until DNA testing becomes part of the standard anti-doping
screening.

~~~
eesmith
Sure. And Cordwainer Smith mentions (in The Ballad of Lost C'Mell) that the
cat underperson "C'mackintosh had been the first Earth-being to manage a
fifty-meter broad-jump under normal gravity." At present what you mention is
equally as science fiction as the nanotech predictions of the 1990s.

In any case, the author argues that "Athletic performance follows a normal
distribution" and "The normal distribution we see in athletic capabilities is
a telltale signature of many small additive effects that are all independent
from each other."

I wanted to give a counter-example. Normal distributions don't have the hard
cutoff that we've seen in pitching speeds.

Edit: "No other primate throws with anything comparable to human force.
Chimpanzees, who are much, much stronger, pound for pound, than human beings,
can throw, as any zoo visitor knows. But the best an adult male can do is
about 20 miles per hour. A 12-year-old human pitcher can easily throw three
times that fast." [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/science/evolution-on-
the-m...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/science/evolution-on-the-mound-
why-humans-throw-so-well.html)

The hypothesis is that early humans, "around 1.8 million years ago ... [began]
to hunt big game and needed to throw sharp objects hard and fast", or perhaps
it was only "hundreds of thousands of years".

In either case, it appear that humans have specifically evolved for throwing,
with most of the energy coming from the shoulders, not from long or cord-like
tendons. Our genetics may already be near the optimal, with respect to single
point mutations.

Not only might cheetah ligaments and muscles make little difference, they
might actually be worse.

~~~
nikofeyn
> In either case, it appear that humans have specifically evolved for
> throwing, with most of the energy coming from the shoulders, not from long
> or cord-like tendons.

that's not really true. as someone who can throw a baseball quite fast, you
really want relaxed shoulders. tense shoulders are a great way to get injured.

from my experience throwing, most of the throwing power is generated from the
hips. then it comes up your lats on your back which generates a whipping
motion through the shoulder. you want this energy transfer from the hips to
the arm to be as smooth as possible, hence loose shoulders. near the end of
the throw, the triceps and then forearm engage to complete the whip. other
than knowing this from throwing, it's pretty easy to know because these are
the muscles that are sore when i haven't thrown in a long while.

~~~
maxerickson
Even someone without a practiced throwing motion can demonstrate the
importance of the hips in the motion; just try throwing with arm only while
standing flat footed.

------
lifeisstillgood
So we are getting better at finding those genetic outliers who continue to
outperform at their given sport.

But this is becoming more and more detached from reality of the majority of us
sitting inside the genetic bell curve.

Finding time in lives dominated by commutes, education and young families,
finding sport that can be integrated into our lives, and building a society
that encourages moderate athleticism should be a priority - shaving another
second off a sprint does not it seems encourage millions to get off the couch
- so we should invest in what does.

Otherwise sport is just another branch of the entertainment industry.

~~~
cm2012
This isn't the whole story. High school track times are faster now than world
champions 40 years ago.

~~~
prh8
I wouldn't quite go that far.

In 1936, Jesse Owens won the Olympics with a 10.3. Athletic.net[1] (which is
not perfectly complete but close enough for reference) shows 33 high schoolers
who ran 10.39 or better in 2017. So yes some are faster, but that's almost
zero and 80 years later. None of these high schoolers have matched the 9.55 at
the 1968 Olympics.

[1]:
[https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Division/Event.aspx?D...](https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Division/Event.aspx?DivID=79871&Event=1)

~~~
icelancer
>Jesse Owens won the Olympics with a 10.3

Jesse Owens also ran in terrible spikes on an ash cinder track. Jesse would
threaten to break 10 flat if they used today's equipment with the very hard
tracks in use today.

~~~
goatlover
Owens also didn't have starting blocks.

------
prh8
> Even the combination of an elite runner and anabolic steroids, though, was
> not enough to outcompete a genetic outlier.

This ignores the (very likely) possibility that Bolt is also doping, albeit
with today's designer drugs and not anabolic steroids. When testing catches up
to today's drugs, we will look back at Bolt differently. He is definitely a
"genetic freak" as they say, but there's more to it than that.

~~~
ethan_g
Indeed, Jamaica doesn't have strong anti-doping organizations and Bolt has
teammates caught doping. I'd love to believe Bolt is clean, but I find it hard
to give him the benefit of the doubt.

~~~
paganel
Same here. I really tried to believe that Carl Lewis was not doping, as he was
one of my heroes as I grew up, but as the time passes I realize that he was
most certainly doping. The same will probably happen to today's kids who grow
up with Usain Bolt being their idol.

------
vacri
When you have to rely on a one-in-a-billion genetic freak to make new records,
we _are_ 'close to the limits'. When you have to have teams of scientists and
coaches working to improve one individual just a tiny bit, we _are_ 'close to
the limits'. It's not like you can pop a pill and run 100m in 5s, blowing away
current records.

------
velobro
This may be an unpopular opinion but I really want there to be leagues with no
rules on performance enhancing substances just to see what the human body is
ultimately capable of.

Michele Ferrari is pretty despised in the cycling scene but the research he
was doing really highlighted what's possible with sports science

~~~
clort
Every time this comes up, I need to ask.. who _decides_ to use this
performance enhancement when the enhancement is applied to young children for
maximal effect? That suddenly turns morally dubious, and we can't suppose that
nobody would do that, because we know for sure that _somebody_ would.

------
deepnotderp
I'm very excited to see genetic engineering allow amateur athletes who work
very hard (often harder than professionals!) to to become good.

------
projektir
> We’re just scratching the surface of what genetic outliers can do.

That seems to be the crux of it.

Genetic outliers, yes. When I hear a phrase like "limits of athletic
performance", though, I don't expect to read about genetic outliers, which, to
me, are wholly uninteresting. The real limits of athletic performance if we
mean genetic don't even end with humans.

Was hoping that this was going to be about people not fulfilling their
athletic potential overall. This seems to be getting worse for the average
person. I think we pay too much attention to genetic freakishness instead of
the average, on many accounts.

------
0xcde4c3db
> By comparison, the potential improvements achievable by doping effort are
> relatively modest. In weightlifting, for example, Mike Israetel, a professor
> of exercise science at Temple University, has estimated that doping
> increases weightlifting scores by about 5 to 10 percent.

Based on how blatant the difference is in other contexts (most obviously
modern bodybuilding), I'm guessing that's actually the difference between
people who got caught and people who didn't get caught, not the difference
between doping and no doping.

~~~
Avshalom
We'll part of it is that what doping really let's you do is recover fast and
thus train more. So in a lot of contexts it just reveals the limits of
training more than the physical limits.

~~~
jackmott
No, that is what people who make excuses for dopers, say about doping.

But the 1st order thing steroids will do is just make you stronger,
immediately, by themselves, even if you don't train differently (or at all!)

The 1st order thing taking EPO or doing blood doping will do is just give you
more aerobic endurance, immediately, by itself.

No doubt some 2nd order benefit may result from also being able to train
harder / recover faster while using these drugs.

~~~
lern_too_spel
The misconception comes from the days when athletes stopped taking PEDs a
month before competition to avoid getting caught.

------
kisstheblade
Are they implying that Bolt isn't doping? Everyone at that level dopes.
Everyone. So they are on an equal standing there. (source: there have been
documentaries about this)

~~~
kisstheblade
Nice job down voting. Just watch the documentaries. It's ridiculously easy to
not get caught. Even if the whole government isn't aiding you (as is the case
with russia). And the level at the top is just so tough that you have to dope.
Every percent matters.

~~~
jwilk
From the HN guidelines:

 _Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and
it makes boring reading._

------
Havoc
Well I'm sure there will be continuous improvement, but it'll be a case of
shaving off miliseconds I think.

The current crop of athletes have already essentially devoted their entire
lives to eating/training etc just right so I think any further advances will
be marginal. These aren't enthusiasts doing stuff on weekends anymore -
they've got state level backing and large scale selection from a young age
(see China).

(Above excludes possibility of genetic engineering obv).

------
z3t4
I think most advances will come from better materials. Faster balls, tracks,
spikes, stronger shirts, etc.

~~~
querulous
the record book in swimming was obliterated by the LZR 'fastskin' swimsuit.
98% of medals won in swimming in the beijing olympics were won by athletes
wearing the suit. 93 world records were set by athletes wearing the suit
before it was banned. many of those records still stand

------
virtualwhys
The fastest pitch is likely closer to 110 MPH given what Chapman has done.
Take a clone of Chapman, but with gigantic hands, taller, and stronger.

And if the UCL is indeed the limiting factor, it's not hard to imagine a
future where the ligament will be surgically enhanced via some kind of
synthetic graft.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
> it's not hard to imagine a future where the ligament will be surgically
> enhanced via some kind of synthetic graft

I'm not convinced - biocompatibility is a bitch. Whenever someone tears e.g.
an UCL or an ACL, there are no options other than transplanting in a human
graft, either taken from the patient (often parts of the hamstring) or from a
corpse.

~~~
icelancer
> there are no options other than transplanting in a human graft

This isn't true anymore. Internal brace method is the most common advancement.
There are other less ethical ones being done by select surgeons, too.

~~~
quickrandom
Less ethical?

------
Chiba-City
I loved playing soccer and tennis. Heroes for little kids are nice. I grew up
with some Baltimore Oriole playing families in Baltimore.

But why would anyone care? we suffer fools dumping taxpayer dollars into
ludicrous athletic programs for lesser colleges and mostly empty new stadium
sky boxes for corporate lobbyists.

Passive viewing of sports and entertainment is dull. Attentions and dollars
are better devoted to efficient live musical performance. So many of my fellow
DC software engineers turned out to be talented instrumental musicians. I
presume that early ambidextrous and symbolic training cultivating skilled code
slinging applied mathematicians is not coincidental.

My consulting firm did some work in drug discovery. We were already tapped out
on brute force discovery by the 1990's. Elective medicine seems indefensible
feeding kids synthetic food and leaded water.

Encouraging kids to suffer supersized heroes on drugs beating dogs and women
is unwise. My own mathlete kid watches ZERO TV And loves Aikido.

Has demographic crisis, boredom and research attentions wasted on militaries
driven good people mad?

~~~
bigleagueposter
Is Aikido better than sports? A lot of it seems to be based on a ton of
bullshit. Imaginary feats of mystical founders and delusions that you can
actually use it in a fight.

------
notadoc
No probably not, but the overwhelming majority of developed world populations
(USA leading in particular) are getting far less athletic and far more obese,
which is certainly a limit on athletic performance.

~~~
123456112
Not really. More and more people know how to avoid getting fat, thanks to the
internet. I'm 21 years old in a western European country and barely anyone my
age is overweight, and a sizable minority even has a professional athletes
body from working out.

~~~
antisthenes
Obesity is heavily correlated with poverty.

As inequality around the world grows, so will obesity, so at median, people
will get less fit, while the outliers will become more athletic.

~~~
adrianN
I hate to say it, but correlation is not causation. Unless you can provide
some studies that show people who get rich e.g. from lottery winnings, also
lose their weight and vice versa with proper controls for depression and the
like there is no reason to believe that an increase in economic inequality
will lead to an increase in obesity.

~~~
L_Rahman
The lottery winner sample is a bad one because the argument about poverty
causing poor health behavior is an overall lifestyle problem and not just a
resource one.

Children who grow in the upper middle class or upper class will grow up with
access and encouragement to participate in physical activities, parents who
are better informed and able to construct healthier eating habits and the
resources and cultural permission to use mental health professionals as
needed.

Winning a 100 million jackpot after growing up poor can't change that.

------
Nomentatus
Re Freeman Dyson's prediction - actually we already directly convert energy
from sunlight, using the chlorophyll we eat, believe it or don't. We just
don't make that chlorophyll.

Amazing Discovery: Plant Blood Enables Your Cells To Capture Sunlight Energy
Posted on: Tuesday, May 12th 2015
[http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/chlorophyll-enables-your-
ce...](http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/chlorophyll-enables-your-cells-
captureuse-sunlight-energy-copernican-revolution)

~~~
hossbeast
That article gives off a vibe of complete nonsense.

~~~
eesmith
I'll add to that. Even if humans could convert sunlight into energy as well as
plants (they can't), we would only be able to generate about 15 kCal/hour.
[https://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosynth...](https://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosyntheti-
people/) . That's well less than 1/10th of what we need just for basic
metabolism.

Of course, we aren't covered with chloroplasts, not even close. So we're
talking at best a teeny-tiny amount of what we need to live. There's very
little reason for evolution to conserve these pathways[0]. Especially since we
know that people can survive and be healthy on a meat-only diet in the arctic,
where they are covered in clothes. This includes western Europeans who have
not had any genetic adaptations for that climate or diet.

[0] The photosynthetic systems must not be digested, must be transported
through the blood to the whole body, make it through the cell walls to get to
the mitochondria, be maintained at the right concentration, with some way to
excrete the waste products.

~~~
gus_massa
Relevant [what if] xkcd: "Green Cows" [https://what-
if.xkcd.com/17/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/17/) It's a similar analysis, but it
uses cows instead of humans.

