Definition of sport-specific ability

Specialized sports ability is a comprehensive and individualized set of abilities that an individual possesses in order to meet the competition rules, action patterns and performance requirements of a specific sport, integrating special physical fitness, technical proficiency, tactical decision-making, mental toughness and project cognition.

But if you take this standard definition and ask practitioners of different identities, the supplementary explanations you get may be quite different, and sometimes it is not surprising that the two sides even quarrel.

I had been on the sprint team of a city sports school for half a year. I saw a 16-year-old kid who could squat 180 kilograms. He could carry 30 kilograms more than his teammates in the same group. However, he ran 30 meters slower than others by 0.2 seconds. Every time the coach trained him, he directly complained, "Your strength is in useless places, and your special ability is far behind." In the context of first-line coaches, the boundaries of "specialty" are extremely tight. All abilities must be fully adapted to the force angle, muscle contraction speed, and movement rhythm of the specialization. If it cannot be directly converted into special performance, no matter how well you practice, it will not count. For example, no matter how good you are at bench pressing when practicing weightlifting, if you can’t connect the force when doing a clean, it’s useless. ； No matter how fast your reaction speed is when practicing table tennis, if your shape of receiving the serve is always wrong, you still can't win the ball. Their definition is extremely pragmatic, and their core judgment criterion is only one: whether they can produce results.

Compared with the "narrow definition" of the practical school, scholars in universities and scientific research institutes generally agree more with the broad definition, and they pay more attention to the transfer effect of general abilities to specialized abilities. I have been browsing sports psychology journals before and saw a follow-up study on national team badminton players. Among those players who ranked at the forefront in both technical and physical fitness tests, nearly 30% of them missed key points at 19-level at a rate that was 2.4 times that of ordinary players. This trait of "losing the chain at the critical moment" is considered a lack of special psychological ability in the evaluation system of scholars, and it is also part of the shortcomings of special abilities. In addition, they will also classify the understanding of event rules, prediction of opponent's tactics and even the ability to recover quickly after the game into the category of special abilities. The logic is also very simple: these abilities will eventually affect the competition results and there is no reason to exclude them.

What is interesting is the definition dispute between these two groups. In the past two years, they have been particularly fierce in the issue of cross-border and cross-disciplinary selection. Two years ago, when I was working with the physical fitness team to support winter sports, I met an athlete who had gone from long jump to cross-country skiing. His explosive strength and core control abilities were at the top level. After eight months of training, he won the runner-up in the national competition. At that time, the team had been arguing about his training plan for almost a week. The practical coach thinks that his special ability is strong enough, so he just needs to brush up on the track more to get a feel for it. ； Academic researchers insisted that his cornering techniques were completely inconsistent with the logic of power generation and were "using basic abilities to make up for special shortcomings." He would definitely suffer in the international competition. As a result, when he went to compete in the European Cup, he lost 0.18 seconds due to deformation of his movements when passing through Turn 11, just 0.1 seconds short of qualifying for the finals. Both parties later felt that their judgment was correct - the coach said that if he had brushed the track a few more times to become familiar with the turn, there would be no problem. The scientific researchers said that if he had changed his movements earlier, he would not have lost the 0.18 seconds. In essence, the definitions of special abilities are different.

In fact, there is really no need to worry about which is the standard answer. This definition itself serves different training goals. If you are coaching young athletes who are just getting started and want to lay the foundation, use a broad definition to focus on physical fitness, psychology, and rule awareness. Don’t narrow the path too early. ； If you are leading top players who have reached the international arena and want to close the gap of 0.01 seconds, then use the narrow definition of the practical school. All training focuses on special movements, and every set of training must directly serve to improve performance.

To put it bluntly, special sports ability is actually very similar to the proficiency of a single hero in a MOBA game. No matter how good you are at looking at the overall situation and replenishing troops stably, you can kill randomly when playing other heroes. However, if you switch to this hero, his skills are not accurate and his position in team battles is always wrong. That means the hero's "special ability" is not good - in essence, it is "the ability to do things well in a specific scenario", which is not that mysterious.