The Blindspot of Deliberate Practice: Specific Training

Deliberate practice without concurrent specific training is what took out Tiger.

In the first chapter of David Epstein’s book Range, he details and contrasts the difference between Roger Federer's and Tiger Woods's youth. More specifically, he details how Roger did not “specialize” in tennis as a youth but instead played other sports like soccer, and then later, as a young adult, specialized in tennis. Tiger “specialized” in golf as a youth and played no other sports or had no other physical stimuli. This generates quite an interesting contrast since both would go on to be the dominant athlete for a period of time in their respective sports.

Epstein argues that Roger not “specializing” as a youth as Tiger did, was essentially a better path to being the number one player. He claims that Roger not specializing as a youth gave him more “range” as a young adult, which then allowed him to become more specialized later, which allowed him to achieve his lofty status within the game.

It is our view that Epstein’s hypothesis, although interesting and compelling, is incomplete and inaccurate.

The 10,000 Hour Rule

Epstein argues that the early specialization undertaken by Tiger encompassed an early level of deliberate practice that eventually caused his ultimate physical decline in his later athletic career. Often, this concept of deliberate practice is associated with the 10,000 hour rule.

On the heels of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 bestselling book Outliers, the 10,000 hour rule became encrusted in the framework of any coach, athlete, or otherwise who wanted to get better at a specific skill. On the surface, it was inappropriately interpreted that to become better at something, it was going to require that you dug in for long periods of and simply accumulated time to become better.

A deeper dive into the data suggested otherwise - that 10,000 hours wasn’t actually a rule, it simply was the average amount of time that a cohort of chess grandmasters had spent in the pursuit of their craft. This was blanketed across all skills and their development, such that if this is what the average was for this population, it would simply be the same for others.

Gladwell himself actually walked back his original stance on the 10,000 hour number, as you can see in the video below.

The data that has been repeatedly used to quantify the rule comes from the work of Dr. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University (Dr. Ericsson, unfortunately, passed in 2020). His work on practice, and the type of practice he subsequently defined, deliberate practice, has been absolutely monumental - he was a true pioneer, probing and researching the outer boundaries of what we know about expert performers and how they practice to acquire their “skill” and achieve mastery, while also simultaneously progressing the science of enhancing human performance.

At Absolute, we utilize Dr. Ericsson’s work to coherently understand how skill acquisition occurs through the process of self-organization and how to best consciously constrain the athlete and provide the practicing athlete with the necessary feedback so that the athlete can better learn how to optimally organize themselves in a manner that allows for success in sport.

Dr. Ericsson himself has suggested numerous times that the idea of a benchmark quantity of time is not a valid or accurate way of describing the skill acquisition process. This stems from the notion that it is not simply a quantity that defines the process; it is a matter of the quality of the practice that more so defines the outcome. Again this is the reason why the framework of becoming world-class at any skill within six months, as espoused by Tim Ferriss, is also probably also not highly accurate.

Ericsson’s last publication before his passing, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, is highly recommended.

A Massive Blindspot: Training Science

It is important to note that the authors and their works discussed above are excellent sources of information; however, they do suffer from a massive blindspot:

They neglect the role of physical capacity and its role in the skill acquisition process due to a lack of understanding of training science.

As Dr. Zatsiorsky states:

“Strength conditioning theory is part of a broader field of knowledge, the science of training athletes, also termed training science.”¹

It is inappropriate, incomplete, and inaccurate to discuss the skill acquisition process for sport without understanding its relationship to training for physical capacities. It is through the cultivation of the physical self via specific training work that the skill acquisition process for sport is enhanced. More specifically, it is this linkage of specific training being utilized to cultivate physical capacity in parallel with deliberate practice that is the massive blindspot in the works of Epstein, Gladwell, and Ericsson.

Deliberate Practice Only = Biological Accommodation

Deliberate practice without concurrent specific training is the pathway to biological accommodation.

The statement above is a fact. Deliberate practice without deliberate training work being performed in parallel is the pathway that generates widespread biological accommodation within the athlete - a phenomenon that we see spreading like a highly contagious pathogen to athletes across all sports. Biological accommodation is, without a doubt, a primary contributing factor to the stagnation in sport - regardless if all of us here at Absolute are the only ones who have identified and acknowledged it.

Biological accommodation is a Black Swan for the athlete but not for the reader of Absolute.

We have stated this prior but will repeat it here: the only antidote to biological accommodation is specific treatment/training work. This understanding allows us to state that: starving off biological accommodation within the athlete is a primary objective of the strength practitioner. Never, at any level, do we want the athlete we are responsible for to biologically accommodate to the sport. It sounds counterintuitive, but we want the athlete to accommodate to Point B - the optimal physical state of the athlete must be in for practice and play to occur. [subscriber video topic]

Tiger’s Downfall

Tiger performed deliberate practice without concurrently performing joint-specific training work - thus, he was on the pathway or the roadmap to biological accommodation at the joint level, and it was just a matter of time, sadly. Epstein, like many strength coaches, has a total blindspot of the Biological Law of Accommodation and, thus, he blames Tiger’s downfall mistakingly on “early specialization,” with his definition of early specialization simply being defined as deliberate practice at a young age.

Tiger’s downfall was not that he deliberately practiced and neurologically “specialized” in the sport of golf. His downfall was that he biologically accommodated at the joint level to sport due to a lack of joint-specific training in parallel with his deliberate practice.

Training determines the self, whereas practice organizes the self. When there is no specific training in place with deliberate practice, the practice will then determines the self, and biological accommodation to sport is the result - the last thing we want as strength practitioners.

1. Zat͡siorskiĭ V. M., et al. Science and Practice of Strength Training. Human Kinetics, 2021.

1.