A deep dive on athletic potential range
Your athletic potential is genetically predetermined… but your athleticism isn’t.
We each have a genetic range on how good we can be at any given skill. Certain people are gifted biological advantages for specific skills, while others are gifted biological limiters for those same skills.
But, as with anything, the nature vs nurture debate isn’t entirely one-sided.
Each person has an athletic potential range (APR), bookended by a floor and a ceiling.
If you’re strapped for time, here’s the TL;DR version:
- Your athletic ceiling is the most athletic version of yourself that would exist in a utopian society with perfect development.
- Your athletic floor is the athletic version of yourself that exists if you just did the bare minimum to get by.
- Sometimes life isn’t fair; one person’s athletic floor can be higher than your athletic ceiling.
- You don’t have one APR, you have a million+. You have a different APR for every skill.
- There are 3 big lessons we can learn from acknowledging the existence of APRs: 1) you have a lot of control over where you fall within your range, 2) you have to focus on your own development, it’s not logical to compare to the person next to you, and 3) identifying your highest ceiling can lead you to the most successful career.
Athletic ceiling
If you existed in a perfect world and had perfect training, perfect nutrition, a perfect mindset, and accidents never happened, then you would reach your true athletic ceiling.
Nobody ever reaches their true athletic ceiling. We don’t live in a utopian world. We don’t have all of the perfect answers and training methodologies. Accidents do happen.
The goal is to get as close to your individual athletic ceiling as possible.
Athletic floor
If you did the bare minimum that is required of you, you had poor training (or never trained at all), ate like garbage, and had a toxic mindset, then you would fall to your athletic floor.
(For practical purposes, we ignore the universe where you lose all of your limbs or completely starve yourself. Yes, that would undoubtedly make you the least athletic version of yourself. But, it makes things unnecessarily complex. We consider the athletic floor to be the state that one is in if they just did the bare minimum of things possible as they progressed through their athletic career.)
Hard work beats talent, but not always
Here’s some cold-hard truth: genetics aren’t evenly distributed. Someone’s athletic floor can be higher than someone else’s athletic ceiling.
One person can do everything right, while another eats ice cream for breakfast and skips workouts every week and still performs better.
Yes, Tyreek Hill can walk into pre-game with a bag of McDonalds in his hands and still be one of the best athletes in the world. That doesn’t mean that you can.
You don’t have Tyreek’s genetic code injected into your cells, so you don’t get to play by the same rules. His floor is higher than most of the world’s ceiling.
I should say, his ceiling for being a wide receiver is higher than the rest of the world’s, because you don’t have one singular athletic ceiling and one athletic floor.
You have a million APRs
Thomas Sowell gave us one of my favorite quotes of all time: “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”
That applies heavily to your genetic predispositions. What makes your predisposed to be great at one thing, will predispose you to be subpar at something else.
There is an APR for each individual skill.
- Your APR for running a marathon is not the same as your APR for throwing a shot put.
- Your APR for jumping off 1 foot is not the same as jumping off 2.
- Your APR for small-area quickness is not the same as your APR for sprinting 100m.
- Your APR for being a guard in basketball is not the same as your APR for being a guard in football.
Why does this matter?
Understanding that your actual athletic performance is the result of the interplay between genetics and training helps you to make better decisions and feel better about the decisions that are made.
The important lessons here are:
1) You have a lot of control.
Your genetic sequence dictates the bandwidth of possibilities of how athletic you theoretically could become, but you can control where you fall in that bandwidth.
If you show up consistently, work with a ridiculously high level of intensity every time you show up, and train with intelligence, then you will creep up on your athletic ceiling.
If you put in average effort, you’ll end up in the middle of your APR.
You get to decide how much potential you want to leave on the table.
2) It’s you vs you.
You can’t have a 1:1 comparison of your abilities and progress to the person in front of you. You’re starting from different starting lines.
Identify your own individual biological strengths and weaknesses, measure your starting points, design a plan for how you’re going to amplify your strengths and attack your weaknesses, execute that plan, and re-measure progress to compare to your previous self.
3) You can lean into your strengths.
I’m obsessed with the pursuit of excellence. Whatever I choose to do, I want to be the best at it.
I’m also 5′ 11.75″ (yes, the three-quarters inch needs to be included). There are currently 2 players in the entire NBA that are under 6′ tall.
The odds of me becoming one of the best basketball players in the world were astronomically small. There’s no amount of training that could have morphed me to compete with the likes of Lebron James and Victor Wembanyama.
I did, however, fit the mold of a prototypical defensive back. I was gifted a high percentage of fast-twitch fibers, I had the right body structure, and I had the right mindset. The sport that I had the highest ceiling for was undoubtedly football, so I ran with it.
You can do the same. There’s some skills that you’re going to have a higher ceiling for than others. If your goal is to achieve as much success as possible, find those skills and lean into them.
A quick thought on healthcare in America
I bash on American healthcare a lot. It’s fair to say that there are some gaping holes (i.e. preventative vs curative care and the nonsensical billing practices), but there’s way more right than there is wrong.
We just had another baby and I am re-amazed by how incredible the healthcare system is at taking care of major events, like birthing a baby. Watching American specialists navigate their chosen field is a work of art.
There’s nowhere else in the world that I’d rather have a serious illness or injury. Our healthcare workers are truly world class.
God bless America.
A couple of important things…
- This newsletter is completely free. I spend many hours each week researching, writing, and illustrating (okay, maybe the drawings don’t take that long). The best way you can support it and allow it continue is to share it with people you know. You can just send them to gtperformance.co and they can subscribe there!
- Everything in these newsletters and on our website is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice for you or you athlete. Consult directly with a healthcare professional.
Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about athlete development!
Be >,
Zach
Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS