Why are the africans so good?

trackhead wrote:

Lifestyle - They (for the most part) run a lot of aerobic volume in their youth, up to 70-100 mpw, including running around chasing goats afterwards. They do very little high intensity work in their youth, and run on soft surfaces without shoes.

Also, Kenyans and Ethiopians, for centuries, have relied on their legs to get them around. Over generations this will encourage the population to be predisposed to running.

please reread darwin's theory of evolution over and over and over and over and over.......

also africans do not have a magical extra muscle, the muscles are just placed differently giving more effecient power at moving forward, this is in the quad region

do lots of drills and you'll become more efficient. The best distance runners in the world will run up to 10km/day of drills.

what drills do distance runners do and how do they help running?

what is darwins evolution?

what drills do distance runners do and how do they help? Ive heard El Guerrouj does drills prior to training but what are they? bautista?

what is darwins theory?

lots of high knees, skips, jumps -- lot;s of stuff to improve form and efficiency. Watch the 2003 Paris 10k and watch the part when Meb and Bekele are running side by side.

casual runner wrote:

what is darwins theory?

google it

sounds like a load of bullshit.

bump

bump!

Research has been done on this question. Apperantly it isn't about the goats or the altitude. From Science Magazine:

"Leading the charge in penetrating the Kenyan mystique has been Bengt Saltin, a Swedish physiologist who heads the Copenhagen Muscle Research Centre in Denmark. In the 1990s, Saltin's group began comparing Kenyan and Scandinavian runners by scrutinizing their physiological makeups and assessing the "trainability" of novice runners in both countries.

A decade later, the scientists have ruled out most of the popular explanations for Kenyans' domination of running. Altitude is not the key to the riddle, they have found, because there's no difference between Kenyans and Scandinavians in their capacity to consume oxygen. And the Kenyan diet is on the low side for essential amino acids and some vitamins as well as fat, says Dirk Christensen of the Copenhagen center: "In spite of the diet, they perform at high level." The running-to-school hypothesis was demolished as well: Kenyan children aren't any more physically active than their Danish peers. Do Kenyans try harder? The researchers found that the Danes actually pushed themselves harder on a treadmill test, reaching higher maximum heart rates."

So what does account for the great Kenyan results? Kenyan bodies are different from Danish bodies - different in shape, with less massive calf muscles, different in ratio of slow-twitch muscle fibers, and different in the ability to process the toxins that accumulate during endurance training. These differences are genetic. Science has confirmed what should be obvious to the observer - Kenyans are built to run long distance races.

Here is an excellent discussion of the study I mentioned with links:

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002505.html

Another good discussion of the topic here:

http://mb9.theinsiders.com/ffanhomefrm10.showMessage?topicID=9804.topic

You're telling me that Kenyan youth sit on their ass just a much as Danish children?

No, Trackhead. I'm not telling you that, the Copenhagen Muscle Research Centre is, based on a decade of research.

I believe that was the second marathon medal for a Kenyan woman the same as USA. I also believe that the womans marathon record is held by a non african. In yesterdays marathon there was only one african to medal, and 3 of the top 5 finishers were non african.

It does say in Train Hard, Win Easy that Kenyans seem to be quite content sitting around watching the world roll by. Most of them probably have to help out with farm work a lot more than kids in developed countries but farm work hardly constitutes a distance base.

It's better biomechanics, that they were born with. But the funny thing is now they are getting spanked by Ethiopians with noticeably different strides (short, bulkier guys, still really thin compared to a normal guy though). I think a lot of this is because the current crop of Kenyans aren't quite like Tergat or Komen. But the little shorties do have the main WR's.

Elias.. wrote:

I believe that was the second marathon medal for a Kenyan woman the same as USA. I also believe that the womans marathon record is held by a non african. In yesterdays marathon there was only one african to medal, and 3 of the top 5 finishers were non african.

I would guess that African women are not as free to pursue sporting careers as women in wealthy countries like the US, England or Japan. I've heard it said that women do 90% of the work in Africa. Lot's of potential runners are too busy trying put food on their tables to worry about much else. For this reason women's running results probably aren't a great way to judge the relative running abilities of various population groups.

thin build, perfect mix of fast twich and slow twich muscle fibers, and they train like mad men.