In everyday life, the term “expert” is used in a variety of different ways. For example,
at a humorous level, it could refer to someone who is wearing a suit, carrying a laptop
computer and who is more than 50 km from home! More seriously, this term is often
used to refer to the possession of specialist knowledge in a designated field (e.g., medical
pathology). For example, an “expert witness” may be summoned to appear in court in
order to offer an informed opinion about some legally contentious issue. On other
occasions, the term is ascribed to someone who is deemed to be exceptionally skilful in
performing a specific task such as tuning a piano or repairing a watch. What these two
definitions have in common is the idea that expertise depends on some combination of
experience and specialist training in a given field. But how much experience and what
duration of training qualifies one as an expert?
In an attempt to answer this question, cognitive psychologists tend to invoke Hayes’
(1985) “ten-year rule” when defining expertise. Briefly, Hayes discovered from his study
of geniuses in different fields (e.g., musicians, chess players) that nobody had reached
expert levels of performance without investing approximately ten years of sustained
practice in the field in question. Using this criterion, we can define an expert as someone
who has displayed consistent evidence of a high level of proficiency in a specific field of
knowledge as a result of at least ten years of sustained training and experience in it
(Ericsson and Charness, 1997). By convention, this criterion is deemed equivalent to
about 10,000 hours of practice in the field in question (Starkes et al., 2001). Interestingly,
by contrast with many other definitions in psychology, this ten-year rule (or its “10,000
hours of practice” equivalent) appears to be remarkably consistent across a range of
different activities within the domains of music and sport. For example, Ericsson,
Krampe and Tesch-Romer (1993) found that expert pianists and violinists had conducted
over 10,000 hours of practice between the ages of 8 and 20 years. Similar corroboration
of this rule has emerged from research in sport with evidence that elite soccer players
(Helsen, Starkes and Hodges, 1998), figure skaters (Starkes, Deakin, Allard, Hodges and
Hayes, 1996) and wrestlers (Hodges and Starkes, 1996) satisfied the stated criterion. In
summary, Starkes (2001) concluded that the best athletes in these three sports have
accumulated about 10,000 hours of practice within 10–12 years of specialisation in their
chosen sport. Additional support for this rule comes from Ericsson (2001a) who claimed
that the typical age at which most sport stars reach their peak is between the mid- and
late-twenties—which is approximately ten years after most young athletes have begun to
practise seriously for their sport.
Despite the canonical status of the ten-year rule, some sport psychology researchers
(e.g., Starkes et al., 2001) have identified certain problems with it and some exceptions to
it. First, as we mentioned earlier, the quality of practice undertaken to become an expert
is at least as important as the quantity of practice. As Starkes et al. (2001) concluded, it is
more important to understand “what practice is best and how practice should be carried
out” (p. 175) than simply to count the duration of such practice in hours or years. Second,
most people develop expertise in certain complex skills (e.g., learning to cycle) in less
than the requisite ten years. Again, this point has not been adequately addressed by
proponents of the rule. Third, there are exceptions to the ten-year rule in certain games
and/or sports. For example, the legendary Bobby Fischer had attained the status of an
international chess master by the age of 15 years—a remarkable feat which suggests less
than the stipulated amount of experience. Regardless of these caveats, however, most
Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 154