The Sports Gene summary

As with basketball, having the right skeletal structure can be of great benefit in many other sports, too. Of course, how we define “right” is determined by the sport under consideration.

Long-distance runners, for instance, benefit from a so-called “Nilotic” body – a very slim torso and thin legs – as evident in today’s best marathon runners.

We now know that inherited skeletal structure is clearly advantageous to playing certain sports – but equally important is muscular structure.

Muscles are made up of two types of fiber: fast-twitch and slow-twitch.

When we do any kind of sports, we quickly start panting. This is because our muscles demand oxygen to function. Unsurprisingly, the amount of oxygen that an athlete can take in will greatly influence his or her performance.

This so-called aerobic capacity, or VO2max, is defined as the maximum rate of oxygen intake over a period of increasingly strenuous exercise –  for example on a treadmill.

In addition to its influence on muscles, skeletal structure and aerobic capacity, our genetic makeup also affects athletic performance in more subtle ways. For instance, did you know that our genes influence our motivation and desire to train?

As studies have indicated, one’s genes greatly determine how much he or she exercises: up to 75% of the variation in the amount of exercise people do is due to their genetic makeup. This has a neurological basis, as the brains of some people don’t sense pleasure as readily as others, which means those people have to train harder to feel gratified.

If you follow athletics, it’s hard not to notice that a disproportionate number of the world’s most successful long-distance runners hail from Kenya and Ethiopia.

What explains this dominance?

As astounding as the dominance of East African nations in long-distance running is the extraordinary success of sprinters with West African heritage.

For the past few decades, every Olympic finalist in the men’s one-hundred meters has his ancestral roots in West Africa.

The key message in this book:

Although hard work and training are certainly crucial in any sport, one’s athletic abilities are also massively influenced by ancestry. From your skeleton to your muscles and even to your motivation, your genes play a large role in determining your athletic fate. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the divide between the specific abilities of runners with ancestry in East or West Africa.