DNA testing to enhance your sporting performance
Harnessing individual insights from a genetic test can improve your health and fitness, enhancing your performance for optimal results.
Being at the peak of your performance has psychological and physical benefits that can boost your days on a personal and professional level. If you enjoy working out, but are not quite a professional athlete, and have the desire to optimise your performance, genetic testing can bring insights that can take you closer to the best version of yourself.
Improvement at different rates/ different responses to training
“Inter-individual variation” is something researchers have begun to focus on. This refers to the variation between individuals during training. We can use this information to enhance our performance, and it starts by better understanding what makes us different.
In this video, our Head of Product and former Great Britain Olympian, Andrew Steele gives us an overview of Enhance Your Performance: A Genetic Guide.
The role of DNA and the personalised Approach
Andrew Steele found out about the ‘inter-individual variation’ first hand. As a former high-level athlete and Olympic medalist, he understands what high performance looks like. Throughout his career he has investigated trying to enhance his performance, this included training with a number of world-class athletes.
In training with these athletes, he observed something interesting; they all improved at different rates. For some, high-intensity training improved their performance massively, whilst others showed very little improvement. Additionally, as training progressed, some athletes would become more fatigued than others, also requiring longer periods of recovery between sessions.
It was clear to him that a one-size fits-all approach to performance was insufficient. What he has learnt over the years of being an olympic athlete, as well as in the genetics industry, are included in Enhance Your Performance: A Genetic Guide, all in attempts to help you the enhancement journey.
The one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to fitness and diet is what we are used to. But the growing science of genetic testing has revealed that fitness and diet have genetic predispositions that can either hinder or help your desired goals. If this goal is to enhance sporting performance, it may even be more helpful to have these insights. DNAfit does not use genetic testing to test sporting talent, but rather the insights derived from a genetic test can assist in enhancing performance from a training, diet, sleep and stress perspective.
Enhance Your Performance: A Genetic Guide
How important is recovery?
Anyone involved in exercise knows that recovery is important, and yet, it’s often the first thing to be neglected. Inadequate recovery can have negative effects like injury, underperformance, even illness, or eventually non-functional overreaching and the development of unexplained underperformance syndrome (UPS; commonly known as overtraining syndrome).
The DNAfit recovery study
In a DNAfit study, we investigated whether knowledge of genetic variation would be useful to coaches. We explored whether the DNAfit Recovery algorithm could predict recovery needs in a study carried out by three football coaches.
These coaches put a team of 18 soccer players through a repeated sprint training session, exactly the type of session which would lead to large amounts of fatigue to develop in these athletes. The players were also tested in the countermovement jump (CMJ), which has been shown to be a reliable and valid way to measure neuromuscular fatigue.
We were most interested in variation in seven genes thought to impact exercise recovery — GSTM1, GSTT1, SOD2, IL6, IL6R, TNF, and CRP. We gave a score for each gene variant based on its negative impact on recovery and then added these up to create what is known as a Total Genotype Score (TGS).
The key finding from our perspective was that athletes with a slower genetic recovery speed had a greater reduction in CMJ height post-training, and this reduction lasted for a longer period of time, relative to athletes with a fast genetic recovery speed.
This shows that the use of genetic information can be of use in enhancing performance, as it allows for the identification of individuals who may be predisposed to have a slower post-exercise recovery process.
It’s clear that we can now use genetic information to predict the speed of recovery following a hard training exercise, and use this information to guide various different recovery methods following training.
Can caffeine affect your sporting performance
Caffeine is the most widely used performance-enhancing drug in the world, consumed on a daily basis by 80% of the world’s population. In today’s society, we consume caffeine for a wide variety of reasons from overcoming tiredness to social situations where coffee is consumed.
But, alongside its use by the general public, caffeine is also widely used by athletes, with around 75% of within-competition doping samples containing caffeine. Athletes consume caffeine because of its well-established performance benefits across a range of exercise types, and these effects are so strong that, between 1984 and 2004, caffeine’s use in Sport Optimal was banned at high doses by the International Olympic Committee.
Caffeine is what is termed a “competitive adenosine receptor antagonist”. Adenosine is the naturally-produced chemical that makes us feel tired and relaxed. Caffeine competes with adenosine for its binding site, preventing it from exerting its relaxing effects. This helps us stay alert for the necessary training period. Caffeine is advantageous because it also acts to reduce feelings of pain, increase adrenaline secretions, increase alertness etc. This is why some leading athletes use it as the extra edge to their optimally enhanced performance.
In one study, in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, aerobically conditioned runners performed five treadmill runs to exhaustion (at approximately 85% VO2Max) after receiving one of the following treatments 60 minutes prior:
- caffeine capsules plus water
- regular coffee
- decaffeinated coffee
- decaffeinated coffee
- caffeine in capsule form
- placebo
Caffeine in capsule form significantly increased work capacity allowing them to run an additional 2–3 km, as compared to the four other treatments.
Management of caffeine also affects the important area of sleep, which also needs to be managed well for optimally enhancing sporting performance. How caffeine and sleep relate to each is a delicate balance that can help optimize your performance, if managed appropriately.
Inside the guide you’ll learn:
- Can our genes affect how we respond to training?
- Why should we train and the role genes play
- How does caffeine work? And How much should you take?
- The impact of DNA on caffeine
- What role do your genes play in exercise recovery?
Click here to download the guide.
