Quarter milers in the house!
We certainly ran them in practice but that wasn’t my event, I get better as the distances get longer. Not good enough to really matter at a team level though.
As you mentioned in your earlier post, what gets scary is how fast the splits of world-class guys are at longer distances. And while the 400m guys I was around loved to chirp about how hard our distance was, none of us wanted to run 800m. And we mostly tried to pretend 400m hurdles wasn’t even a thing. 
We’re in agreement on this. I probably got a little carried away talking about speed and how it relates to running so maybe my point got lost, but yeah I 100% agree with this. You don’t need a boatload of fast twitch muscle fibre to play speedy guitar, you’re not asking your body to do heavy lifting or to launch its entire mass across 100m or more of distance as fast as possible, you’re asking it to move finger and arm joints at a quick pace which like you say, I feel is accessible to near everyone.
I feel this sentiment in my bones. Which after long speed workouts, I would happily have given away to someone freely, if they’d offered to just take the pain away.
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There very well may be players with huge fast twitch abilities. But for I guess arbitrary reasons it doesn’t really matter because many of the tempos we consider “fast” are actually doable by a large percentage of people if they’re willing to learn the techniques. So that’s good news, every kid really is a winner for once!
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Much of this thread falls into TLDR but in my personal experience as well as working with students myself, I find bursting to help with the ability to mentally sustain coordination between the two hands at high tempos. It’s pretty much just like what Martin Miller describes in that video someone posted above, and in all of the practice pedagogy written for classical instrumentalists that I’ve read (on no specific instrument) the #1 most common exercise I keep coming across for developing sustained control at fast tempos is some variation of bursting. Sometimes it’s called playing in rhythms, sometimes is called “add a beat” but the idea is always the same: do small bits of the passage and gradually chain them together as you feel capable of doing so, at a challenging tempo.
I believe just having the raw speed in either hand doesn’t mean someone can automatically coordinate the two perfectly and with no mental discomfort. Maybe some people can. But the idea of being able to increase mental capacity to “control” or “align” these faster movements for longer and longer stretches of time is aided by burst practice. Mental discomfort = physical discomfort. And I’ve literally seen students isolate individual hands at the same fast tempo, say a single string lick, to where they can play a single note just fine, they can legato just fine, but as soon as I ask them to pick fast with the left hand it’s like someone slammed on the brakes.
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i think the burst exercise should be swing tempo to sextuplets/triplets that way at least during the slow down phase you are still working at tempo for two strokes (down and up, you could burst one triplet and flip flop this to up and down to cover all aspects, or just do one sextuplet grouping to get it back to down and up) then a slight pause. finding that sensation of being relaxed while still accomplishing a tempo that just seems so far out of reach if you are trying to rapid fire triplets in succession for beats at a time for 20 seconds long. you have to start somewhere and 2 notes at tempo is still 2 notes so that way you dont get discouraged. i havent really practiced speed in this sense though for like weeks or months. and i am actually pretty certain it will build up speed as this is a rhythm style both jazz and blues utilizes so it likely will just build speed on its own if you just play in swing rhythm often. and i probably hate to be the bearer of bad news but however high you can swing tempo something is probably your cap with whatever motions you are using with your body. now years and years of playing live, you might can get faster, but if you don’t regularly play that won’t occur. everybody is likely different in this case, unless you start forcing the speed via tension then you can get it higher.
but i will be clear this will work magic for single string stuff, the cross string stuff good luck. haha that is another can of worms you will have to work on. the only solution i can see for myself is to wear a thumb pick that has a nice pick shape like a dunlop flow, and learn to flamenco so i can economy pick both ways with extreme speed. or just get good enough with my thumb nail to use it like a pick. that ultimately i feel is as far as you can take it. i await the day we see the next big gun doing this kinda thing then i will be shocked. 
but this swing rhythm burst trick might only work for players who have played awhile so they are more consistent with how they play, and know some stuff that feels good under their hands. this probably wouldn’t work for beginners.
I’m curious to know if you still believe this now after you’ve discovered your 250+ bpm DSX reverse dart-thrower movement.
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There’s not enough data to say conclusively, but if you ask me to guess, I think there are likely differences, and some may even dictate differences in ultimate performance in some skills that can’t be eclipsed by training. I’ve read the Ericsson stuff extensively, and lots and lots of recent motor learning research. That’s my gut feeling just based on the evidence so far.
Longer answer:
There’s no solid data to disprove the existence of individual innate neurological differences that affect things like performance and learning. But the reverse is true, and the body of that research is growing. We’ve talked about some of this before in our lessons, like the studes done by Maurice Smith’s lab at Harvard, which investigate innate differences in motor system randomness. Bence Olveczky’s lab, also at Harvard, did a gangbusters study on rat learning with millions of trials that not only supports this, but teases out the actual circuitry of randomness, and shows strong evidence for innate individual differences between individuals that affect learning speed. If these types of neurological differences exist, I see no reason to assume others don’t unless you prove it to me. So I think as time goes on we’ll discover more effects like this and that there are, in fact, some biological roots of both learning and performance.
Does this mean the effects predict or prevent ultimate performance? In some cases maybe, in other cases maybe not. Again, I see no reason for there to be a one-size-fits-all here. However I would also guess that the differences, where they exist, are likely to exert their most powerful effects on an untrained population, controlling who does and does not make it through the filter and ‘discover’ efficient ways of playing.
The filter effect is at least one of the factors, along with chance, that explains the spotty distribution of great picking skills in self-taught populations. Just keep in mind that I also think it’s probably responsible for selection bias even in populations with lots of training, like people in music conservatories.
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That’s all very reasonable, thank you for the detailed response. I’ll think on it.
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I know people tend to get worked up over this kind of stuff so I’ll also add that’s it clear that most people can learn to do most things they want to do on a guitar. People mainly worry about questions of “natural ability” when they have trouble doing something they want to do. That’s when they start to wonder if maybe they’re not genetically cut out for it. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when people show us actual video of the problem, it’s not genetics — they’re just doing it wrong. Once you eliminate that, they start to care a lot less about whether guitar hero XYZ is 15% faster at some super top-end speed that they never use.
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I just thought this sounded very genuine, and wanted to tell you this because sometimes I have my doubts about the methodology here. But this paragraph should be somewhere on your subscription page. 
I like that 15% faster sentence because I can 100% guarantee if someone was to listen to an average player cover this guitar heroes song at 85% speed they wouldn’t really be able to say hey that is not up to tempo in the moment.
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