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Research Article
Performance trade-offs and individual quality in decathletes
Jeffrey A. Walker, Sean P. Caddigan
Journal of Experimental Biology 2015 218: 3647-3657; doi: 10.1242/jeb.123380
Jeffrey A. Walker
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern Maine, 96 Falmouth St, Portland, ME 04103, USA
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  • For correspondence: walker@maine.edu
Sean P. Caddigan
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern Maine, 96 Falmouth St, Portland, ME 04103, USA
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ABSTRACT

Many constraints of organismal design at the cell and organ level, including muscle fiber types, musculoskeletal gearing and control-surface geometry, are believed to cause performance trade-offs at the whole-organism level. Contrary to this expectation, positive correlations between diverse athletic performances are frequently found in vertebrates. Recently, it has been proposed that trade-offs between athletic performances in humans are masked by variation in individual quality and that underlying trade-offs are revealed by adjusting the correlations to ‘control’ quality. We argue that quality is made up of both intrinsic components, due to the causal mapping between morpho-physiological traits and performance, and extrinsic components, due to variation in training intensity, diet and pathogens. Only the extrinsic component should be controlled. We also show that previous methods to estimate ‘quality-free’ correlations perform poorly. We show that Wright's factor analysis recovers the correct quality-free correlation matrix and use this method to estimate quality-free correlations among the 10 events of the decathlon using a dataset of male college athletes. We found positive correlations between all decathlon events, which supports an axis that segregates ‘good athletes’ from ‘bad athletes’. Estimates of quality-free correlations are mostly very small (<0.1), suggesting large, quality-free independence between events. Because quality must include both intrinsic and extrinsic components, the physiological significance of these adjusted correlations remains obscure. Regardless, the underlying architecture of the functional systems and the physiological explanation of both the un-adjusted and adjusted correlations remain to be discovered.

FOOTNOTES

  • Competing interests

    The authors declare no competing or financial interests.

  • Author contributions

    S.P.C. collected the data and contributed to the interpretation of the results and revision of the manuscript. J.A.W. analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript.

  • Funding

    This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

  • Supplementary information

    Supplementary information available online at http://jeb.biologists.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1242/jeb.123380/-/DC1

  • © 2015. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
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Keywords

  • Locomotion
  • whole-organism performance
  • Physiological traits
  • Form–function mapping

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Research Article
Performance trade-offs and individual quality in decathletes
Jeffrey A. Walker, Sean P. Caddigan
Journal of Experimental Biology 2015 218: 3647-3657; doi: 10.1242/jeb.123380
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Research Article
Performance trade-offs and individual quality in decathletes
Jeffrey A. Walker, Sean P. Caddigan
Journal of Experimental Biology 2015 218: 3647-3657; doi: 10.1242/jeb.123380

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