Non-linear association of efficiency of practice of adult elite athletes with their youth multi-sport practice

ABSTRACT

We explored associations of elite athletes’ multi-year efficiency of practice and improvement of performance with their current and earlier participation patterns. Participants were 80 adult German track-and-field national-squad athletes. Performance improvement was measured as development of athletes’ highest track-and-field championship level and placing from 19 to 25 years (t₁-t₂). Practice efficiency was defined as performance improvement per amount of coach-led athletics practice from t₁ to t₂. Participation variables included amounts of coach-led practice and peer-led play in athletics and other sports through t₁ and t₁-t₂. Analyses involved an advanced machine learning procedure, XGBoost, allowing non-linear, multivariate exploration. We computed two models, one for performance improvement (“good” discriminative performance, AUC = 0.82) and one for practice efficiency (“fair”, AUC = 0.73). Four central findings emerged: 1. Childhood/adolescent coach-led multi-sport practice was a critical discriminator of adult practice efficiency and performance improvement. 2. Associations were non-linear, displaying a saturation pattern. 3. The likelihood of achieving high adult practice efficiency was greatest when combining ~1,000–2,500 track-and-field practice hours until t₁ with ~1,250 other-sports practice hours until t₁. 4. Peer-led engagement in any sport had negligible effects. Childhood/adolescent multi-sport coach-led practice apparently facilitated long-term sustainability of athletes’ development of adult practice efficiency and performance improvement in athletics.

KEYWORDS:

• Elite sport
• efficiency of practice
• early specialization
• talent development
• sustainability
• machine learning

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.