Data from: Performance trade-offs and ageing in the ‘world's greatest athletes’

The mechanistic foundations of performance trade-offs are clear: because
body size and shape constrains movement, and muscles vary in strength and
fibre type, certain physical traits should act in opposition with others
(e.g. sprint versus endurance). Yet performance trade-offs are rarely
detected, and traits are often positively correlated. A potential
resolution to this conundrum is that within-individual performance
trade-offs can be masked by among-individual variation in ‘quality’.
Although there is a current debate on how to unambiguously define and
account for quality, no previous studies have partitioned trait
correlations at the within- and among-individual levels. Here, we evaluate
performance trade-offs among and within 1369 elite athletes that performed
in a total of 6418 combined-events competitions (decathlon and
heptathlon). Controlling for age, experience and wind conditions, we
detected strong trade-offs between groups of functionally similar events
(throwing versus jumping versus running) occurring at the among-individual
level. We further modelled individual (co)variation in age-related
plasticity of performance and found previously unseen trade-offs in
throwing versus running performance that manifest through ageing. Our
results verify that human performance is limited by fundamental genetic,
environmental and ageing constraints that preclude the simultaneous
improvement of performance in multiple dimensions. Identifying these
constraints is fundamental to understanding performance trade-offs and
predicting the ageing of motor function.