The Magic of Myelin

The Magic of Myelin

This has been a terrific piece for me personally to put together and I hope it will be for anyone wanting to better understand “talent.” In the world of sports psychology we talk a lot about and instruct athletes to work on "deliberate practice." What exactly is “deliberate practice” and why is it important?  The simple answer is – IT HELPS THE ATHLETE PRODUCE MYELIN.  Myelin is the fatty insulation around nerve fibers that makes electrical nerve signals more efficient.

So what is the connection between “deliberate practice” and Myelin?

It is now very well known that superior athletes and superior leaders of great skill in any field have spent many years carefully sharpening and perfecting their technique (this includes savants, who, by nature of their disability, are able to focus obsessively and persistently on math or music or art, effectively tuning out distractions). Why does high-level skill take so much time and steady effort to develop? It turns out that this slow, patient persistence is exactly what myelin needs to become a thicker and more efficient insulator. You can't rush that process. In neurology, myelin is being seen as an epiphany. This is a new dimension that now helps us understand a ton about how the brain works, especially about how we gain skills, all skills.

Let’s take a look at the current epicenters of great sports training; the Spartak tennis center in Russia, golfers in South Korea, baseball payers in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. What is the common thread?  Deliberate practice.  This is an obsessive focus on technique. Each of these places are incubators for deliberate practice. Harnessing the competitive drive comes later (at Spartak, they don't allow students to compete in tournaments for at least three years).

“He’s gifted”  “What a natural” “That guy was born to do that” Those are all things people say when they see extraordinary feats and phenomenal skills.  But are some people born that way?  Are some people born with more efficient myelin-boosters than others? Maybe so. Maybe, on top of the years and years of persistent development of technique, Anna Kournikova and Tiger Woods also got lucky in the genetic lottery. But what I as well as many others in this field have learned following the last few years of research, genetic differences seem less and less relevant. 

Here is why:1. No one has actually found these much-vaunted genetic differences relating to skill and talent.  Maybe they're connected to intelligence, maybe even persistence….?  All we know is that we haven't actually found them yet.
2. Regardless of what differences we're born with, there is a lot of evidence that suggests: most people do not come remotely close to achieving their genetic potential
high-level achievement is simply impossible without hard work and persistence
3. We also know from definitive research that no one benefits from a mindset that relies on their "natural" abilities. Students encouraged to rely on their natural gifts stagnate, as do poor-performing students told that they are limited by some disability. In opposition, students of every caliber perform better when they are encouraged to equate hard work with results.

Athletes and age of peak performanceThe path of an athlete’s career follows a parabolic arc: a fairly steep rise as the body matures and skills are acquired, a peak, and then a slower, flatter decline as ability fades. But what causes this peak and decline? Obviously it has to do with physical attributes like speed and power, but what about the deep, underlying aspects of performance?

The consistency of this rise-peak-decline pattern is striking, even across very different sports. For nearly every major sport, the age of peak performance is in the range of 22-30, and some interesting trends emerge when you look at sport type in relation to an athlete’s peak age. The age at which performance tends to peak across sports seems to mirror the continuum from purely explosive, athletic sports to slower, more skill-based sports, with explosive sports peaking earlier. Further, even within sports that combine different abilities, explosive abilities (like base stealing in baseball) tend to peak earlier than more cognitive, skill-based abilities (like drawing walks in baseball).

• For baseball, a number of studies, using different methods, have pegged peak age between 27-29.
• For Tennis, peak age has been pegged between the early 20′s and 25.
• For basketball, peak age has been found to be at 27 for all positions, with different positions showing different patterns of decline.
• For Track and Field, peak sprinting age has been found to be in the lower-mid twenties, with endurance events having a little older peak ages.
• For golf, athletes have broader peaks–between 25-35, with slower declines.
• For football, running backs and receivers peak around 27, with running backs showing sharper fall-offs than receivers. Quarterbacks have a broader peak between 25-35. 

But why do athletes decline? One place where we are now looking for an explanation is in myelin integrity. As noted above, myelin is a fatty sheath that insulates the axon of the neuron, the long portion of the neuron that conducts the electrical signal when a neuron “fires”. This sheath acts like an electrical insulator, and allows the axon to conduct a signal much faster than an unmyelinated axon. You’ve all heard of “gray matter,” but myelin is what we call “white matter” when we’re talking about the brain as opposed to “gray matter”, which is mostly composed of neuronal cell bodies. Neuroplastic changes in white matter have been observed in musicians and other categories of experts–it’s as if repetition and practice cause the laying down of additional layers of this myelinated insulation–so it isn’t too great of a leap to anticipate that highly trained athletes might exhibit differences in myelination and white matter when compared to the general population.  

Given that myelin is associated both with expertise and with the ultra-fast conduction of nerve signals, it seems logical to explore whether the degeneration of myelin might be associated with the decline that we see in athletes’ performance. Myelin integrity also exhibits a parabolic trajectory with age, and the breakdown of myelin is associated with slower nerve conduction and cognitive and physical decline. But while this seems like a plausible explanation, studies have shown that myelin integrity actually peaks around age 40. In a study conducted at UC San Diego, a range of subjects were tested on a very simple but common neurological test, finger-tapping speed. Maximal finger tapping speed requires high-frequency action potential bursts and is associated with myelin integrity. The study results found that myelin integrity, as measured by brain imaging techniques, and finger-tapping speed closely mirror each other, and peaked around age 39. The study’s concluded that the results suggest that in this very healthy male sample, maximum motor speed requiring high-frequency burst may depend on brain myelin integrity.

Interestingly though, even in the most skill-based sport, golf, performance decline begins before 39, the age at which studies suggest that myelin integrity peaks. Decline in every sport happens while myelin integrity, and thus the quality of the signals sent through the brain and body, should still be improving. So, again, why the decline?  It is potentially productive to examine when certain physical attributes begin to decline, and whether those might explain why athletes lose competitiveness with age. Decline does not seem to be related to a loss of physical strength. Studies have found that muscle atrophy due to aging doesn’t begin until around age 50, so that seems like a dead end.  Another potential cause might be an accumulation of injuries.

Certainly in high-impact sports like football, or sports with razor-thin margins that make injuries relatively more debilitating like track and field, we tend to see younger ages of peak performance. It may just be that the wear and tear on the body over the years erodes an athlete’s ability. This idea is bolstered by research on how football running backs who carry the ball more than 370 times in a season tend to show a predictable pattern of decline in the ensuing seasons after that huge workload.

But the metric that seems most related to decline is pure explosiveness. We see the most explosive sports, like track and field sprinting, peaking the earliest. Even within sports, as in football, positions that rely more on explosiveness (running backs) peak earlier than those that rely more on other, more experienced-based skills (quarterbacks). The neurological metric that seems to fall more in line with peak athletic age, and with this explosive speed, is reaction time. Reaction time peaks in the 20′s and then begins to fall off. Specifically, it is complex reaction time that declines fastest. So why do reaction time and explosiveness peak when they do?  In reality, athletic decline is probably due to a number of interacting causes, both physical and, potentially, neural. The exact mechanism behind why athletes peak when they do, despite the predictability and inevitability of the process, is not 100% understood, but it’s getting there.

So how do you become a superior athlete?  Deliberate Practice and Myelin!  Practice smart, practice hard, practice long!

Greg DiRenzo, M.S.
Performance Coach, Trainer
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