i think my objection is that calling a super-elite/dominant athlete "lazy" is a judgment cast down without any thought for the person as a whole. i made this point already, but without knowing someone who is dominant at their craft intimately, you can't say that whatever approach they took to become dominant is a sub-optimal approach. maybe being relaxed and getting fat in the offseason is what shaq needed to average 26-30 points and 11-14 rebounds for ten years, be a 15-time all-star, 3-time finals MVP, and have his number retired by the lakers. you and i just don't know.
usain bolt has been training to be a sprinter since he was a kid. he might not be the hardest working sprinter out there, and he's clearly a freak among freaks, but calling him lazy robs the word of any meaning.
calling athletes like that lazy just smacks too much of easy armchair quarterbacking. "god damn brady, why didn't he see welker open in the flat? if he'd hit him that's 15 yards easy, first down, run out the clock, game ovah! instead he throws to god damn double-covered gronk and gets picked off. what kinda bullshit quarterbacking is that?" those two things are in the same category to me.
Ehhh... I think your attaching something especially negative to the word lazy rather than taking it to mean just not hard-working. Sometimes what isn't as hard is optimal; for example ask any quarter miler and they will tell you that every high-jumper is lazy! The training for high jumping allows you to be lazy... doesn't mean it's bad. Additionally, sometimes the greatest athletes are so great that they can be lazy! External motivation is HUGE for 99% of people. That's why the fastest sprinter on most college teams dicks around in the weight room and eats skittles. The guy who walked on and might get cut anytime is usually the hardest working guy in the weight room. Occasionally you have the guy at the top who pushes himself despite the fact that he is rarely pushed by anybody, but it's rare... most of the time the king gets lazy... it's human nature!
I think there's a BIG difference between your armchair quarterbacking example and pointing out that a dominant athlete is taking sub-optimal approach to improvement. The first is assuming that the implementation of what you see on your flat screen TV is somehow easy in real time in a helmet with huge guys flying at you; this is OBVIOUSLY wrong. The second is applying what you know about physiology and human performance to critique someones training or practice regime.
Yes, I will give you that there is an element of sports psychology and that you can argue that Shaq somehow "needed" to gain weight to relax and prime himself for the upcoming season... But... how far are you going to extend this? My buddy went to college with Maurice Clarrett (this isn't the best example because he ended up flaming out) who at the time was an EXTREMELY dominant running back, an absolute freak in terms of size/speed/mobility. From firsthand experience the guy was lazy as hell, skipped out on the weightroom,
put vodka in his waterbottle at practice, got high before games, and generally didn't seem to care at all. Despite this he was still extremely dominant at his craft... Does that mean we can't critique his training, that it was unorthodox but not sub-optimal? Are you gonna argue that alcohol during practice allowed him to relax which translated into better football performance? Or are we going to agree that from what we know about alcohol and the human body that this was sub-optimal for his performance? I will give you that we don't know 100%. This could just be some real unorthodox stuff that works for him. But, with very high probability I think that guys approach was not optimal.
Also, examine why do you give this standard only to elite athletes? Would you say that same to someone on the forum who uses ridiculous training methods and gets not results? If Raptor insists that naked swiss ball deadlifts are the key to vertical jump are you going to tell him his training is sub-optimal or are you going to admit that there is a chance that the paltry results that he has obtained might actually be his genetic ceiling and these training methods are what works for him? Why only assume that the elite guys are maximizing their potential. Of course there is a correlation between effective training and performance; so on the whole the person who performs better is probably doing closer to optimal training. But did you read the previous post? That correlation should actually be WEAKER for the outliers! Consider the outlier on the other side of the performance curve; someone born with an ailment like muscular dystrophy. His poor performance in athletics is likely not the fault of poor training, just like the amazing performance of the positive outlier is likely NOT the result of optimal training. All sports are different but in sports with large genetic components this is especially true. I think you should revise your statement to read: someone who has improved from a mediocre or intermediate level to an advanced level has very likely taken an optimal approach. For those that are on the extremes; all bets are off.
