What Playing (and Training for) 20+ Sports Taught Me About Athleticism

By Samual Johnson, CSCS

I’ve always loved sports—playing them, learning them, training for them. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in or trained seriously for more than 20 different sports and physical disciplines. Soccer, water polo, golf, ultimate, tennis, wrestling, disc golf, pickleball, ping pong, swimming, volleyball, climbing—you name it. I’ve also spent years exploring things like long-distance running, Olympic lifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding, CrossFit, and calisthenics.

That might sound like a lot, but honestly, it’s not all that rare—especially among people who grow up active. Most athletes I know didn’t just specialize in one thing. They bounced between different sports, tried new hobbies, joined pickup games, and stayed curious. That variety is part of what made them athletes in the first place.

What I’ve learned from all this is simple: athleticism isn’t some innate gift—it’s a process. It’s something you build, skill by skill, rep by rep, over time. And if you’re willing to chase it, anyone can become more athletic.

Defining Athleticism

People tend to define athleticism in surface-level ways: how fast someone is, how ripped they look, how much they can lift, how good they are at their sport. Those things can be part of athleticism—but they’re not the full picture.

From what I’ve seen, true athleticism comes down to a few deeper traits:

1. Competitiveness.
   Athletes want to win. They care about improving. Even if someone acts chill on the outside, if they quietly grind when no one’s watching and show up better than everyone else, that’s an athlete.
2. Movement history.
   Great athletes have done a lot. From a young age, they’ve exposed themselves to different physical problems and learned how to solve them. They’ve sprinted, rolled, jumped, climbed, thrown, balanced, and reacted under pressure.
3. Intuitive skill acquisition.
   Highly athletic people don’t need step-by-step instructions to learn something new. They pick up the rhythm and feel of a skill quickly—often because they’ve done so many similar things before that their body just knows how to adapt.

Athleticism isn’t a stat you max out. It’s a skill set—a mix of coordination, drive, adaptability, and accumulated experience.

Genetics Matter—But Experience Matters More

Let’s get this out of the way: yes, genetics play a role. Some people pick up skills faster. Some recover better, have better hormone profiles, move more fluidly, or get more dopamine reinforcement from learning.

But you can’t control your genetics. You can control your exposure and effort. That’s what I care about. That’s where the agency is.

Most “unathletic” people I meet aren’t being held back by their genes. They’re being held back by a lack of movement history. They never learned how to move, never developed the confidence to explore new skills, and now—at 30, 40, or 50—they say, “I’m just not an athlete.” But it’s not genetics. It’s reps. Or a lack of them.

Athleticism Is Trainable—At Any Age

If you’re that 30-year-old who sucks at golf and feels discouraged, you’re not doomed. You’re just early in the process. Maybe you only ever played baseball or soccer as a kid. Maybe you stopped after high school. And now that you’re trying something new, you feel like a beginner again.

Of course you do. You are a beginner again. The solution isn’t to give up—it’s to go get reps. Chase movement diversity. Practice with intent. Learn how to learn again. That’s the path forward, and it works at any age. Learning one skill opens the door to learning others. Every time you gain coordination, confidence, and proprioception, you raise your baseline. Athleticism builds on itself.

What Actually Matters When Learning a Skill

Across all the sports and skills I’ve trained, I’ve found three big things that drive learning:

1. Prior movement experience.
   Having a large base of movement exposure helps you pick up new skills faster. Swinging a baseball bat can make it easier to learn a golf swing—not because the skills are the same, but because they rely on similar muscle groups, movement patterns, and timing. The coordination you’ve already built helps you adapt more quickly.
2. Repetition.
   This is simple but underrated. If you want to get better at a skill, you have to practice that skill—again and again, with small adjustments along the way.
3. Intent.
   Reps without desire won’t move the needle. If you care about improving—if you’re emotionally invested—your brain will pay closer attention. You’ll process success and failure more deeply, which cements learning and drives progress.

You can’t shortcut this process. You can’t outsmart it with theory. Skill comes from doing.

Skill Is Specific—General Athleticism Only Takes You So Far

One of the hardest lessons to internalize—especially as someone who loves training—is that general physical ability doesn’t automatically make you good at specific skills. Power, coordination, and speed are useful, but they don’t transfer as neatly as we like to think.

A strength coach I’ve followed and respected for a while, Will Ratelle, put this into words better than anyone. He argues that “rotational power,” as it’s often talked about in the gym world, doesn’t really exist as a separate quality. There’s just power—and how it shows up in specific, practiced contexts.

You don’t get better at hitting a baseball by doing more rotational med ball throws. You get better at hitting a baseball by hitting baseballs—under pressure, at game speed, with the variables that come from live competition. That’s the only place the real skill lives.

His point hit home for me, because it lines up with everything I’ve seen in myself and others:

• General athleticism can help you pick up a skill faster.
• Prior experience can help a new movement feel more familiar.
• But to truly get good, you have to train that exact skill, in that exact context.

You can be explosive in the weight room and still be terrible at swinging a golf club. You can be jacked, fast, and powerful—and still struggle with something as specific as a backhand in tennis or a butterfly stroke in swimming.

General movement capabilities create the foundation. But specific performance always comes down to specific practice.

Why I Believe This—My Experience as Proof

This isn’t just theory. It’s my story.

Yes, I moved a lot as a kid. I played sports. I wrestled with my brothers. I ran around outside. But I also played a ton of video games. In middle school, I dropped out of soccer for a while. I joined band. I was less active. When I came back to sports in late middle school and high school, I thought I’d be good. But I wasn’t. I was average. Middle of the pack. My results didn’t match my self-image.

But I didn’t quit. I started training seriously. I fell in love with the process. I chased reps in the gym. I played more sports. I moved. I failed. I adjusted. By junior year, I was part of a state championship soccer team. In college, I helped win national championships in flag football, competed in club ultimate, disc golf, and intramurals, and kept picking up new skills. And the more I learned, the faster I learned. My capacity grew with every rep.

That’s how I know athleticism can be built.

I still run into sports, exercises, and skills that I suck at. There are movements that feel awkward, patterns that don’t click right away. But I don’t let that stop me. I never let the feeling of defeat define what I’m capable of. If you want to become more athletic, you have to be willing to suck at things—over and over—until you don’t. That mindset is part of athleticism too.

Athleticism is built through experience, repetition, and the refusal to stop learning. It’s the sum of all your movement history, the drive to improve, and the humility to start from zero—again and again.

Anyone can become more athletic. It just takes time, curiosity, and reps.