Yet another thing to blame your parents for!

I know it’s tough but for a moment do a John Lennon, and by ‘do a John Lennon’ I don’t mean sod off to India and study transcendental meditation, I mean imagine. Imagine a just and fair world where each of us are born equal with the exact same potential for achieving whatever we wanted to. In this just and fair world the only barrier to us achieving success would be the amount of hard work we were prepared to put in.

The trouble is we don’t live in a such a world. It would be great if we could all look like Arnold Schwarzenegger provided we trained hard enough but we can’t and there’s no point pretending we can. Some people are simply high responders to exercise, some are not.

It comes as no coincidence that myself and my two brothers barely need to train at all before appearing noticeably more muscular and athletic. And who do we have to thank for this? A large amount of gratitude must go to our parents. Old pictures of my dad show he had biceps that most bodybuilders would die for despite him never actually going to the gym, and to this very day many people still marvel at the strength my mum displays when helping us out with the odd DIY construction project.

My brothers and I were obviously very lucky to have inherited those strong genes from our parents, but some people are not so lucky…  

In one study which looked at muscle growth in people following the exact same resistance training programme, the high responders increased their muscle size by 50% with some of the low responders increasing their muscle size by a depressing 0%.

This type of response isn’t just limited to muscle growth. A study of 1000 people looking into the effects of training on stamina and endurance found that roughly the top 10% of the participants were super responders and made dramatic improvements, whereas the bottom 10% were low responders who made very little improvement at all (with the remaining 80% of people falling somewhere between the two extremes).

Not only does genetics play a large role in determining how much muscle you can build or how long and far you can run for, it also (amongst other things) plays a role in regulating how much fat you have, and where about on the body you store it.  

Now before you hold up the white flag and surrender on your plans of getting fitter because you think your parents dealt you a bad gene-hand, bear this in mind, genetics do not account for 100% of a person’s physique, there are a number of other factors involved which you can control and just because your body maybe genetically predisposed to store more body fat, it is not an excuse to deliberately let it do so. It just means you have to work harder than other people to overcome that problem, yet at the same time remain realistic about the limitations that our bodies impose.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

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