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I have been watching world sports events for many years and watching these Olympics in Athens has made me think....

How can human being still keep breaking world records after so long at competition ?

OK.... I do know that training regimens are far more sophisticated than they used to be and I do know that modern dietry discipline produces bodies that are near perfect for the job that they are required to do....AND... I do know that some of the athletes also take performance-enhancing drugs...BUT:

There must be an upper-limit to what the un-assisted human body can do and if there is we must see more and more world records being left unbroken nowadays as a result

Accepting the above...I want to ask how they still do it when they should have reached their peak of performance as humans many years ago.

yes, i did watch the swiming competitions yesterday...to see olympic records being broken. however....we can only call that unexpected..not impossible. The training is very good indeed, however...we can assume that a species, as time goes by evolves and adapts to the suroundings. A period of time as let's say a millenia...is a little short to accept any significant dna changes (though these occur!) but hey...we're always changing.
oh..and none of the athletes take performance enhancements....and get away with it. it's a pretty fair competition. they get caught.

constant improvements in training methods, and general evolution... its probably safe to say the athletes of today are generally better than the athletes of yesteryear, and the same will be true of athletes from the next generation

Yeh guys...I already accepted that stuff, but the point I was making was how can the human-animal keep running, jumping, swimming and throwing faster and more efficiently when basically our bodies haven't changed all that much over the few thousand years that Homo-Sapiens has been in existence.

As as already been said....serious change in body shape and performance via evolution needs to be done over very long periods.

I know that certain traits CAN be bred ito certain animals in a reasonably short period, but I don't even think that humans breed for those specific traits YET.

well...no big differences indeed...but it's not like they're breaking records with 10ths of seconds. it's mostly within a second

Hmm maybe its the same phenomena that keeps raising the A level pass marks...

yea exactly, evolution may take 1000's of years but it isnt a sudden change, its gradual...and this shows in the small amounts the records are broken by...

breaking record doesn't depend on the athlet alone. sometimes luck, or competition, sometimes the location.
at some competition alot of records are broken at once and at another none at all.
then sometimes when the competition is really close, you feel that there is some gogd competitor besides you, you might just push urself that little bit further, enough to break the record by that miliseconds.
i don't think it's that large an increase in speed to call in evolution as a reason.

i've been thinking about that recently as well


but i didn't get an idea

Clovie hun sometimes ya just leave yourself wide open for someone like yerssie to come behind you and post

watchya mean?

exactly, as stated before, evolution of training equipment and revised training techniques from studied past olympics. all it is though is how the athlete trains and WHAT they train with. simple as that. I would like to believe in the will power and ambition part of humanity though. I mean we always strive to be better and out do ourselves. So of course we will keep going for those unbreakable records. the olympics havent been around that long, with world wide training facilities and abilities.as it has been the past thirty years.

chemical substances

Actually, evolutionary studies have begun to prove that evolution can happen in a very short period of time, it's the build-up that takes time.

As for the question of how we keep breaking records...I can't answer that in anyway that hasn't already been stated.

Yeah DF02.......

I think that you have got something there !

Mind you that would suggest that they will bever hit a maximum efficiency if they are slowly evolving to beat the records by tiny amounts each time.

With THAT thought in mind we might see high-jumpers jumping over buildings with a single bound after another few thousand years.

What would THEY look like I wonder ?

Grasshoppers maybe !

What a kinky remark? Is saying that even legal?

I don't really think there is much to this. Yes, techniques and fitness and regimens have improved over the last century, but obviously there is a logical upper limit to where that will ever take us, accepting that it explains the long-term increase in standards.

But the fact is... let's say all contestants in track events in the last 16 years- all the TOP contestants- are roughly as good as each other. Every time they run, say, the 100 metres, they do as well as they do- sometimes they do well, sometimes they do badly. There are a million factors that decide how well they do, biut in the end they have got a time, and that dictates how well they have done.

Now, if one person runs that race a million times, the variety in times he gets would be notable, and there would be a top time and a bottom time. An athlete does not run a million races in his lifetime but in this theoretical situation, the best time he gets in those million races is most likely to be a new world record- a one in a million chance. Probably his top 100 times, in fact. So he is capable of doing that.

Now look at the amount of world class athletes running these races in major competitions at least once a month, for every year, over and over and over. Statistically speaking, you'll get more and more people 'lucky' enough to hit the top end of that range of a million theoretical race times, and so more records being broken. And because they are broken in such small amounts- hundreds, or even thousandths, of seconds, the logical point at which that has to end... is probably quite some way off.

Now multiply that out to every single Olympic event and we can expect records to be broken for a damn long time to come!

Wow...

yeah, what that dude meant, about what the other guy said.

Okay then.

Who says our ancestors wouldn't mop the floor with us? remember our world has grown soft compared to then.

There lives were spent in exersise Roman armies constatntly worked out... 40 year old generals were expected to keep up with new recruits and men were beaten to death if they did not meet requirements.

Spartans practiced elimination of the weak and basically genetic cleasing in thier day... new borns were left alone in the woods for 7 days and if they did not survive then so be it.

I say the feats we awe at today have probably been done already but just not recorded. Of course not all of them but the basic swimming and running and others similar.

well the olympic requirements involve waaay more then pure brute strengt. They have to train their muscles and coordonation in a specific way. And that is what they do..so they have all the time to practice..

yeah, a muscle bound body is nothing compared to a well conditioned body. Athletes from way back then compared to athletes now, would be slaughtered in modern day competition. the understanding of science and how the human body works and why it does, is our greatest advantage, over way back when athletes, we know now what excercises need to be done to best train a certain musle area. Training is by far more rigerous, and advanced than ever before, which always plays a big role in the developing olympics. Science in genreal i guess you caould say.

I was watching the long-distance runners qualifying yesterday and realised that the Ethiopians have sewn up long-distance running for a long time now.

Maybe it is because they have evolved from great runners in their distant past in Ethiopia that now makes them so far ahead of everybody else.

That would suggest that greatness in physical performace might be specific to where you have lived for hundreds or thousands of years.

well runners who live in high elevation lands are always going to be the best runners, for these people, elevation is a big factor.

i wish i could break some records....