Originally Posted by
bitingduck
but it's not obvious that they were natural slow twitchers, so much as that's what they'd trained for (which might be a "no true scotsman" problem...).
I think when you can plot a noticeable increase in 0-20s sprint numbers over a few years with a person who has been successful at "slow twitch" events, or see marathoners develop a "kick" after being flat liners, you can pretty much figure there's some fast twitch recruitment. There's always some mix there, no one is 100% one or the other. The ability to recruit one over the other is, no doubt, an individual response to training stimulus.
I was always a pretty decent sprinter, and was a top end TT guy. Since moving the focus over to sprinting, the TT stuff has really suffered. My "long" wattage dropped a fair bit, my sprints have added that few percent that matters and my leg speed has gone way up.
Part of that "long" drop could be attributed to the preponderance of AARP and retirement plan applications that keep showing up in my mail, but that's kind of a flip of what's supposed to happen.
Kids, listen up. Don't get old.