Great sporting quote

[Glucosamine]

10,000 hours = Two hours a day for fourteen years.

Were orienteering simply running, then hours times days certainly helps (injuries and ageing apart - thank goodness for WAVA comparisons), especially for distance events. Nurture always seems to play second fiddle to nature once the foundations are in place, even though many even at club level can find the time for a good proportion of the ten thousand.

Two hours a day orienteering technique practice might be a different matter. Long practice in kicking a ball on a pitch or hitting a ball on a court might be within the range of many but who has such time for daily fresh O-technique challenges? The need to keep it fresh seems to require time (and money) for travel which is probably available only to the few who live close to a good range of mapped quality areas and structure their lives appropriately. So does nurture not then triumph?

[Red Adder]

at least one of the scandinavian world champs from th 80s/90s advocated that you always did distance training runs on terrain with a map - another believed that mapping helped sharpen cognitative skills - but of course they have oodles of terrain on their door steps - the best we could hope for would be park-o champs ?

[Gnitworp]

"expertise is not knowing what you're doing"

...and letting yourself do it?

[graeme]

Precisely. Thus freeing up time for the things you can't do without knowing you're doing them.

[Tim]

Or for an alternative view:

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/publicity/news-releases/2013/58_marathon.html

From our work, we know that 20 per cent of people do not respond at all to training and in fact can get worse. They push themselves as hard as everyone else, but their muscles do not extract the same amount of oxygen.

About 15 per cent have the genes that mean they will respond highly to training. But of that number, only those with a good inherited baseline fitness and good resistance to injury will ever become elite marathon runners.

and

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/publicity/news-releases/2013/06_HIT.html

The regime is called High Intensity Training (HIT) and involves three 20 second bursts of high intensity exercise, with a short rest between each one, a week.

The precise mechanisms are not clear but the findings are very clear, so we can now state that to improve aerobic fitness you do not need to do 150 minutes of jogging a week. Three minutes of HIT can also do it.

Not saying practice is not worth it, but as with all things, it's both - talent and practice - that gets you ahead.

[Glucosamine]

Or for an alternative view:
The regime is called High Intensity Training (HIT) and involves three 20 second bursts of high intensity exercise, with a short rest between each one, a week. The precise mechanisms are not clear but the findings are very clear, so we can now state that to improve aerobic fitness you do not need to do 150 minutes of jogging a week. Three minutes of HIT can also do it.

HIT did not do much for Andrew Marr. Would that there was evidence that three minutes of technique training could be as effective.

[Tim]

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" springs to mind.

3 minutes technical training on Merthyr Mawr Warren is probably worth a 150 minutes on some of the less technical areas on the south (names omitted to avoid offending anyone). But that goes back to the "purposeful" training issue which is a bit obvious.

[graeme]

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/publicity/news-releases/2013/06_HIT.html

Any reference beyond "it was on the TV and the internet, so it must be true"? I know they got a lot of publicity for the HIT-solves-diabetes work based on a study of, um, 12 people, published in that famous journal BMC Endocrine Disorders.

[Red Adder]

was 12 cases roughly the number that arch fraud Wakefield based his "proof" that MMR jabs could cause Autism. The average media person wouldn't know a double blind, statistically relevant* peer reviewed medical research paper if it him them between the eyes.

[* I know the word I'm looking for isn't relevant but I just can't think what it is !!]

[Wayward-O]

[* I know the word I'm looking for isn't relevant but I just can't think what it is !!]

Significant???

[JK]

Johnny Wilkinson is another who was famed for relentless practising his kicking after everyone else went to the showers.

I think one important thing to remember about O technique training though is that any old practise isn't good enough. You have to practise doing things right. Practising doing things wrong will just make you better at doing things wrong. The corollary to this would be that you need to practise doing things when tired since that is often the state you find yourself at the end of a race, but I think it is worth doing your most technical training earlier in your training and your least technical later on.

[JEP]

"Practice makes permanent" but "Perfect practice makes perfect". Practice has to be high quality to be useful. Sloppy practice will make sloppiness permanent.

[madmike]

..... but I think it is worth doing your most technical training earlier in your training and your least technical later on.

That was always the way in swimming, technique drills first and then the efforts

[roadrunner]

..... but I think it is worth doing your most technical training earlier in your training and your least technical later on.

That was always the way in swimming, technique drills first and then the efforts

Just the same in running.