Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?

I see this theme a lot on this board, so thought i'd open up a thread on it. Here's a video to get the ball rolling

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Good lord, does every thread have to be a YouTube video now? Can’t anyone summarize or make their own points?

Or must it all be a freaking Ted talk?

SMFH.

 

physical I think they are there are more good-great big men but over all I think skill is decreasing many fighter seem to rely on just power or speed ant aren't as well rounded as fighters of old

 

Sorry had no interest in the video ..more like faster, bigger, stronger for the most part, yes…. better? NO … Athletes were just as good back then as they are today … If you look at every major sport, and boxing, the old timers are ALL over the best in sports lists … Because there is a lot more to being an athlete than just those 3 elements like the mind, toughness and durability, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc .. There has been ample time for the Top athletes to fade out of from these lists .. Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, Gretzky, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Byrd, Magic, SRR, Ali, Armstrong, etc etc etc etc etc etc … Has happened yet and I doubt it ever will .. The consensus is still very strong here

 

Nope. Sometimes people on YouTube videos are better at expressing themselves than posters

Does every knee jerk response have to be that of a condenscending whiny *****?

 

But those people giving Ted talks or whatever aren’t part of this community. They aren’t part of our discussion. We can’t interact with them.

How about summarize their points along with the video and state your own opinion/case? Rather than take the lazy approach of ‘here’s a video, spend 15 minutes of your time watching it and then reply.’

EDIT: What kind of thread do we get if you post a video and say “Watch this and reply” and then me and everyone else just posts our own Ted Talks in reply without any summary of what they say? Is that a good discussion?

 

ability ebbs and flows, just like it always has, and always will, in every field, not just sport. Anyone saying different is selling something.

 

It's good, but a big point he missed out with track and feild was that they were also held back a lot by the idea of amateurism, and a lot of improvement has come from increasing professionalism, which doesn't affect boxing.

 

We all have different levels of communication skills. There are posters on here who are eloquent enough to write books. Unfortunately i'm not one of them. It's not laziness, it's just a skill i dont possess

Anyway this is way off topic. What's your opinion on the thread subject?

 

Yes, they are getting bigger, faster and stronger in general. More skilled is debatable.

Even in sport that doesn't have a lot of human contact, such as Tennis or Baseball you can see it. The players from the 1970's -1980's would need to be a bit bigger / faster / stronger to compete at the top today.

In sports with contact like Football or Hockey, fans or historians will quickly admit the above. But with boxing...well, not exactly everyone see it this way at heavyweight.

 

how can u get both bigger and faster together?

size prohibits speed.

 

I don’t really think so.

The furthest home runs hit were by Micky Mantal.

The three pitchers with the best fast ball are Nolan Ryan and Steve Dalcowski and Bob Feller.

Hardest Slap shot all time is Bobby Hull.

Here is a video of a race between a modern top sprinter and Jesse Owens with old conditions.

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I think fighters have the tools to be more athletic today, if they use them. And the fighters seem to think so, too. Consider:

1) PEDs are banned. If they didn't improve performance, this wouldn't be seen as necessary.

2) Spinks was an early adopter of modern training way back in the 80s. Now, everybody uses it. Consider how conservative professional boxing is, and what the stakes are. Then ask yourself why so many boxers would use it if it didn't work.

3) Performance in every *measurable* sport has been improved by modern training knowledge. So we know that we can train for certain physical attributes better than we could in the past.

 

Widespread PED use has muddied the waters about what natural sporting progression looks like.

Taking Track and Field as an example, as it's the most widespread sport where performance has (for the most part) a single, quantifiable measurement. Performances improved dramatically after WW2 up until the 1970s across all events. After that point, progression got rather hazy. Some events plateaued, some saw rapid improvement, and some saw steady progression, with all variants in between. Many records in throwing events have stayed constant since the 1980s, most jumping events are untouched since the 1990s. Distance events spiked to coincide with the widespread use of EPO, and have dropped off since. The glamorous sprint events have continued to improve, while jumping events are well down over the same period.

It would take a thesis to make complete sense of all of this, and the overriding conclusion is likely to be that PED use has distorted athletic performance. What it definitely shows though is that this assumption that we are getting faster, better and stronger is not necessarily true. Man over the last 30 years has worked out to run in a straight line faster than ever before. For whatever reason though, he can't jump as long or throw things as far as he once was able to.

Relating that to boxing, we don't know whether boxing is the 100m sprint, where people kept on getting better and better, or whether it is the long-jump, where it reached a peak some time ago and for whatever reason the current crop are just not as good as their predecessors. Or indeed whether boxing has so many variables and intangibles that marginal improvements in specific areas are unlikely to have a dramatic difference in overall boxing performance.

It's not scientific, but we're probably better off relying on the eye test to compare fighters across eras. Watching (eg) Leonard-Hearns I, I don't see any drop-off in quality between that and later fighters, regardless of what would happen if Usain Bolt squared off with Alan Wells on the track. However, I can watch a soccer match from 1981 and see a big difference in speed and fitness compared to the present day. Djokovic-Nadal looks unrecognisable from Borg-McEnroe.

If there had been dramatic improvements in boxing, it would be evident from watching fights, and we wouldn't need to rely on assumptions and tenuous references to other sports.

 

I'm using the term loosely, but here's a rough definition. You generally know it when you see it:

By modern training, I mean a collection of developments in strength, conditioning, nutrition, and injury treatment, which collectively improve athletic performance by big margins.

What differentiates it from old school training is that it's anchored in peer reviewed studies, medicine, or both.

Guys like Shilstone, who trained Michael Spinks for Holmes, are practitioners of this approach to training. His was an early version.

Some indicators of a program influenced by modern training -- though only indicators -- are the use of weight training, plyometrics, prehab exercises, and periodization.

That would be my very rough sketch of what I mean. There are obviously individual exceptions to all of these points.