Batman and the Human Genome 1.3 Addendum

 

In the BATHG 1.3 I introduced the idea that development should follow a format that goes from general to specialised as the training age of the individual increases. Relevant to this conversation is the current event occurring in Tennis; the French Open (2013). The French Open is one of the major events during the year and is played on clay courts, which is synonymous currently with one name; Rafael Nadal. Nadal has been recognised as one of the best players in the world for about a decade now, and he is currently still only 26 years of age.

Nadal is especially pertinent to this discussion for many reasons, but I’ll very quickly address only two for the sake of brevity. It’s common knowledge that Nadal has been trained by his Uncle ‘Toni’ since he was 3 years old, which ties in nicely to our ‘Decade’ rule for mastery of a discipline, however, it goes against the suggestion that ‘elite performers should develop a broad range of ability early on and then specialise later’ or so it seems on the surface.

Nadal did begin playing tennis early on, if you read the above posts again, it was never suggested that this shouldn’t be the case. What was suggested was that focusing solely on one specific discipline too early is more than likely to limit the absolute peak of performance. So in light of this, how did Nadal reach the level he has so far attained? For one, he didn’t solely focus on Tennis. Nadal was also a very talented Football player (and I’m sure very capable in many more sports), and it wasn’t until he was 12 years old that he began to partition more of his time towards Tennis. So he would have spent at least 8 years in a generalised pattern of movement development before specialising, which is completely different to the image that many people have of a young pre-teen Nadal exclusively practicing Tennis endlessly under the eye of Uncle Toni.

In addition to this slight, but very important, mis-perception, Nadal is also not a natural left-hand dominant player; for all intents and purposes he’s a right-hander albeit when playing Tennis. Nadal, again showing his high level of general ability in movement patterns was ambidextrous in his tennis strokes, but was shortening his range by using a bi-lateral (two handed) grip in many of his shots. As a tactical manoeuvre it was decided at a later stage that he would develop (specialise) a left-handed game, one that has served Nadal well since that inception. So again, Nadal exploited the general to specialism pathway in his development.

The more you look at the development of Nadal and his successive success, the more you realise in contrast to the perception that he was a child prodigy who from a young age showed an amazing aptitude for a specific discipline, was in fact, consciously or not, prepared perfectly to allow his innate talent to express itself.