E-Paper
Starting out early helps athletes
Starting out early helps athletes reach freakishly high levels, especially in sports that involve extensive hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills. But the
Starting out early helps athletes reach freakishly high levels, especially in sports that involve extensive hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills. But the skill sets are merely the building blocks. An elite athlete needs to practice and train the skills past the point of autonomy - where the mechanics become muscle memory. And there are no short-cuts, the more hours you put in, the better you get. An elite archer will often shoot up to 400 arrows, silver-medallist PV Sindhu’s coach Pullela Gopichand revealed that the duo can go through as many as 1000 shuttles per training session. The exact same number of Produnova vaults Dipa Karmakar claims to have executed in the run-up to Rio. The hard yards in training, when combined with mental toughness, give one the best chance of succeeding.
