💪 Are today's athletes actually better trained or just have better equipment

Watched an old match from decades ago recently purely out of nostalgia, and immediately noticed how visibly different the players actually looked physically compared to athletes competing at that exact same level today. Genuinely thinner, considerably less muscular, moving noticeably differently overall, even the way they walked between plays seemed to belong to a different era entirely. This sparked a fairly long debate with a friend over whether today's athletes are actually better trained in any meaningful sense, or simply benefiting from considerably better equipment, nutrition science, and recovery technology that simply did not exist for players decades earlier regardless of their own actual raw natural talent or work ethic at the time. My friend argued strongly for pure training and science, pointing out how much more sophisticated fitness regimens, injury prevention, and nutritional understanding have genuinely become compared to what was actually available even just twenty years ago. I pushed back a little, arguing that older players clearly worked with what they actually had available, and might have been every bit as genuinely dedicated, just within a considerably more limited overall support system at the time. We landed somewhere in between eventually, agreeing that both factors clearly matter, though probably in some genuinely shifting proportion depending heavily on the specific sport and era actually being discussed and compared at that moment. What we could not agree on at all was whether an athlete from decades ago, given access to all of today's considerably more advanced training resources, would actually reach the exact same level as current top athletes, or whether something specific about the era itself, competition intensity, general expectations, simply cannot be properly separated out cleanly from the raw individual talent involved in any fair, meaningful comparison. Where do people here genuinely land on this particular question, training and science, better equipment, or some fairly even mix of both factors working together?

Equipment alone explains a good chunk of certain record improvements over recent decades, swimming suits and running shoes especially, though it clearly does not explain everything by itself either at all. Both training methods and gear improved together over the years, hard to cleanly separate one factor from the other when comparing performances across two very different eras of the same sport.

Coaching methods now factor in recovery, sleep tracking and nutrition in ways that simply did not exist when my own father played competitively decades back on far worse equipment than anyone gets today, which makes any direct comparison across eras feel slightly unfair on both sides regardless of which one you happen to personally favour in that ongoing argument at home.