At What Age Do You Peak?

by Panzer
What would happen if Usain Bolt raced against himself?
This is 21 year old Usain Bolt
He’s competing against 31 year old Usain Bolt
And other Usain Bolts in between
Who wins?
Bolt was 23 years old when he set the current world record at 9.58 seconds.
He was never able to match that time again.
If we look at the other best sprinters in history,
we see some peaked in their twenties and a few in their early thirties.
The typical peak of a 100 meter sprinter is at around age 25 to 27.
But what about our other physical and mental peaks?
Do we just peak in the 20s?
You might be thinking this is going to be a
depressing video showing that your life only gets worse from now on.
But as a 30 year old man who gets back pain from coughing too hard, I was happy to find out there
are still several peaks in life ahead of me. I looked at scientific papers and gathered
data on the physical and mental peaks across different stages of our lives.
I also asked my subscribers to fill a survey with their age and these are the results.
And good news, there should be some life peaks ahead of all of you in this chart
I’m going to start by breaking your life into 4 stages.
Stage 1: your childhood.
It seems that you can run around forever, even when adults around you get tired.
It’s at this age that you get your peak in fatigue resistance and speed of recovery.
You keep getting into accidents, but that’s ok because it’s like your body is made out of rubber.
Your flexibility peaks around early adolescence.
The skills you have now are built on the neural circuits that were
shaped during certain critical periods of your young life.
For learning a second language, it seems that the critical period is until age 7.
If you start learning a second language after that age you can still become
proficient but achieving a near-native fluency becomes more challenging.
And research suggests there are also critical periods in childhood for musical abilities.
But things are still getting better.
Enter your 20s.
Life’s good. You feel invincible.
Your reflexes are faster than ever. Your reaction times tend to peak in your 20s.
This study measured the reaction times of players in a video game
and found that the peak was at age 24.
It’s also in your 20s that athletes peak for most explosive sports.
That’s the case of the 100m meter sprint, as we’ve seen.