Born athletes? Identical twin studies show the balance of genetics vs training

[A] new study finds that, of all fitness domains, flexibility is the one most determined by your genes. The study, which is published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, uses data from twin pairs to tease out the respective contributions of genes and environment—talent and training, you might say—for fifteen different fitness tests. Overall, the results support the notion that picking your parents well is a crucial step on the road to athletic stardom, but they also reveal some surprising nuances about how nature and nurture interact.

Digging into the data, [researchers found] that flexibility … and aerobic fitness … have some of the highest genetic contributions. It’s not necessarily the same genes, though! Those who are naturally good at one fitness domain may be terrible at another, and vice versa. And that’s not always a bad thing. In fact, there’s solid evidence that [less flexible people] tend to be more efficient runners.

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