Genetics and endurance sports

Before reading this chapter you should have read Chapter 2, which introduces sport and exercise genetics. Chapter 4 is also useful as it covers the adaptations to endurance training. Research questions related to endurance exercise were a major research focus of many exercise physiologists from the time when exercise physiology emerged as a subdiscipline of physiology. Maximal oxygen uptake (V. O2max), for example, had already been measured in the 1920s by Archibald Vivian Hill (Hill and Lupton, 1923) and others. Classical endurance research is focused on the function of the cardiovascular and muscular organ systems during exercise and on the effect of environmental factors such as training and nutrition. However, while V. O2max and V. O2max trainability are both 50% inherited (Bouchard et al., 1999), only a small proportion of V. O2max and endur- ance training research has been directed at identifying the genetic variations that are responsible for the large variation in endurance capacity and trainability in the human population. However, the tide is changing and the number of exercise physiologists that engage in genetic research on endurance is increasing.