Shadowing Practice: RE3 Unit 1B - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Track 2 Reading 1B What makes an Olympic champion?
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How does a person become an Olympic champion, someone capable of winning the gold?
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In reality, a combination of biological, environmental, and psychological factors, as well as training and practice,
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all go into making a super athlete.
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Perhaps the most important factor involved in becoming an elite athlete is genetic.
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Most Olympic competitors are equipped with certain physical characteristics that differentiate them from the average person.
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Take an elite athlete's muscles, for example.
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In most human skeletal muscles, the ones that make your body move, there are fast twitch fibers and slow twitch fibers.
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Fast-twitch fibers help us move quickly.
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Olympic weightlifters, for example, have a large number of fast-twitch fibers in their muscles, many more than the average person.
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These allow them to lift hundreds of kilos from the ground and over their heads in seconds.
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Surprisingly, a large muscular body is not the main requirement to do well in this sport.
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It is more important to have a large number of fast-twitch fibers in the muscles.
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The legs of an elite marathon runner, on the other hand, might contain up to 90% slow-twitch muscle fibers.
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These generate energy efficiently and enable an athlete to control fatigue and keep moving for a longer period of time.
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When we exercise long or hard, it's common to experience tiredness, muscle pain, and difficulty breathing.
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These feelings are caused when the muscles produce high amounts of a substance called lactate and can't remove it quickly enough.
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Athletes with many slow-twitch muscle fibers seem to be able to clear the lactate from their muscles faster as they move.
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Thus, the average runner might start to feel discomfort halfway into a race.
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A trained Olympic athlete, however, might not feel pain until much later in the competition.
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For some Olympic competitors, size is important.
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Most male champion swimmers are 180 centimeters or taller, allowing them to reach longer and swim faster.
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For both male and female gymnasts, though, a smaller size and body weight mean they can move with greater ease
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and are less likely to suffer damage when landing on the floor from a height of up to 4.5 meters
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some athletes abilities are naturally enhanced by their environment those raised at high altitudes in countries such as Kenya Ethiopia
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and Morocco have blood that is rich in hemoglobin large amounts of hemoglobin carry oxygen around the body faster,
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enabling these athletes to run better.
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Cultural factors also help some athletes do well at certain sports.
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Tegla Leroup, a young woman from northern Kenya, has won several marathons.
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She says some of her success is due to her country's altitude.
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She trains at about 2,400 meters and some to her cultural background.
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As a child, she had to run 10 kilometers to school every day.
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I'd be punished if I was late, she says.
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Although genes, environment, and even culture play a part in becoming an elite athlete, training and practice are needed to succeed.
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Marathon runners may be able to control fatigue and keep moving for long periods of time, but they must train to reach and maintain their goals.
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Weight lifters and gymnasts perfect their skills by repeating the same motions again and again until they become automatic.
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Greg Louganis, winner of four Olympic diving gold medals, says divers must train the same way to be successful.
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You have less than three seconds from takeoff until you hit the water, so it has to be reflex.
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You have to repeat the dives hundreds, maybe thousands of times.
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Training this way requires an athlete to be not only physically fit, but psychologically healthy as well.
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They have to be, says Sean McCann, a sports psychologist at the Olympic Training Center in the United States.
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Otherwise, they couldn't handle the training loads we put on them.
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Athletes have to be good at setting goals, generating energy when they need it and managing anxiety.
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How do athletes adjust to such intense pressure?
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Louganis explains how he learned to control his anxiety during a competition.
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Most divers think too much, he says.
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They're too much in their heads.
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What worked for me was humor.
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I remember thinking about what my mother would say if she saw me do a bad dive.
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She'd probably just compliment me on the beautiful splash.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
The speaker keeps coming back to these words: athlete, muscle, Olympic, fibers, twitch. This video has 50 sentences and 723 words to shadow. The speech runs for 5:30. The speaker talks at a steady 131 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| athlete noun | /ˈæθ.liːt/ | A participant in any of a group of sporting activities including track and field, road running, cross country running and racewalking. |
| twitch noun | /twɪt͡ʃ/ | A brief, small (sometimes involuntary) movement out of place and then back again; a spasm. |
| fiber noun | /ˈfaɪ.bɚ/ | A single elongated piece of a given material, roughly round in cross-section, often twisted with other fibers to form thread. |
| dive verb | /daɪv/ | To swim under water. |
| marathon noun | /ˈmæɹəθən/ | A 42.195-kilometre (26-mile-385-yard) road race. |
| runner noun | /ˈɹʌnɚ/ | A person who moves, on foot, at a fast pace, especially an athlete. |
| diver noun | /ˈdaɪ̯və(ɹ)/ | Someone who dives, especially as a sport. |
| gymnast noun | /ˈd͡ʒɪm.næst/ | One who performs (the sport of) gymnastics. |
| hemoglobin noun | /ˌhimoʊˈɡloʊbɪn/ | The iron-containing substance in red blood cells that transports oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body; it consists of a protein (globulin), and haem… |
| lactate noun | /ˈlæk.teɪt/ | Any salt or ester of lactic acid. |
| competitor noun | /kəmˈpɛt.ɪ.tɚ/ | A person or organization against whom one is competing. |
| fatigue noun | /fəˈtiːɡ/ | A weariness caused by exertion; exhaustion. |
| altitude noun | /ˈælt.ɪˌtjuːd/ | The absolute height of a location, usually measured from sea level. |
| meter noun | /ˈmitəɹ/ | A device that measures things. |
| centimeter noun | (Canadian spelling, alternative) Alternative form of centimetre. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 5 contractions and reduced forms, such as can't, couldn't, I'd. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: athlete /ˈæθ.liːt/, marathon /ˈmæɹəθən/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: differentiate /dɪf.əˈɹɛn.ʃi.eɪt/, splash /splæʃ/, punish /ˈpʌnɪʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: hemoglobin /ˌhimoʊˈɡloʊbɪn/, competitor /kəmˈpɛt.ɪ.tɚ/, differentiate /dɪf.əˈɹɛn.ʃi.eɪt/, psychologist /ˌsaɪˈkɑl.ə.d͡ʒɪst/, characteristic /ˌkæɹ(ə)ktəˈɹɪstɪk/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like athlete, twitch, fiber.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.