The Boom Boom Performance Podcast

The concept of human variation in the ability to respond to exercise training was proposed almost 30 years ago. In a series of standardized and carefully monitored exercise training experiments conducted with groups of sedentary young men and women, 18–30 years of age, it was shown that there were large interindividual differences in the response to training, i.e., trainability. Let’s begin with an example: Height, which is important for sports like basketball and volleyball, is estimated to be 80% heritable. This means that if you don’t have tall parents you probably won’t be an elite level athlete in those two sports. This data set also found that  genetic factors explained 59% of variation in body mass index and 50-60% in the strength measures. The main problem is that we don’t know which genes are responsible for changing performance. In research, most of the genetic studies have focused on aerobic endurance, specifically using VO2max, which measures the maximal amount of oxygen you can utilize during an