Marathon runners are wiry, basketball players are human skyscrapers and
weightlifters are short, squat, muscular beefcakes. Gymnasts are petite and
as bendy as pipe-cleaners, while swimmers have hands and feet like in-built
flippers. It is said that choosing your parents is the most important step
towards reaching the top in sport, with genes determining physique and how
your body functions.
So if you are not genetically blessed, should you kiss goodbye to hopes of
being a sports champion at birth?
Experts say that body build is a crucial factor in determining aptitude for
sport. Professor Andy Jones, the chair of applied physiology at the
University of Exeter’s school of sport and health sciences, goes as far as
to say that “success at elite level is largely down to nature” rather than
nurture. “In Olympic finals, the importance of body type is quite obvious,”
he says. “The build of a marathon runner, for instance, is very different
from that of a hammer thrower or hockey player.”
Professor Richard Davison, the chair of the British Association of Sport and
Exercise Sciences and an exercise physiologist at Napier University in
Edinburgh, agrees. “If you are very short, you are never going to be a
top-class basketball player. And if you are too tall, you will not make a
world-class gymnast. It is not just physical leverage issues that make it
difficult for people with long limbs to perform rotation movements, but tall
gymnasts would be penalised by judges for not looking linear and elegant.”
Rowing speed is predicted by body size
Quite how exact the emerging science of kinanthropometry (the measurement of
body shape, size and limb proportion) can be was demonstrated recently by Dr
Niels Secher, an exercise scientist at the University of Copenhagen. Dr
Secher attempted to predict the speed of competitive rowers based only on
their body size and the weights of their boats. He was accurate to within 1
per cent. Size matters in rowing – elite male rowers are tall, muscular and
weigh as much as 250lb (17st) but have low levels of body fat – and Dr
Secher says that “bigger muscles allow them to use more oxygen, which means
more power”.
Other studies have shown that limb length is an important factor in some
sports. A study by Dr Clare Hencken, at Portsmouth University, has found
that good footballers have long thigh muscles, and Kenyan athletes, who hold
many middle and long-distance running world records, have high calf muscles,
a genetic trait that is thought to enhance running technique. Sprinters, on
the other hand, tend to be tall and muscular but with slim lower legs and
fairly narrow hips, which gives them a biomechanical advantage, says
Professor Jones, and they have a genetically higher proportion of fast
twitch muscle fibres than, say, marathon runners.
“A higher proportion of body fat is not disadvantageous in long-distance
swimming, where fat reserves serve to insulate and fuel the body,” says
Steve Garland, an exercise physiologist at the English Institute of Sport
(EIS). “Although sprint swimmers are getting increasingly muscular,
endurance-based swimmers can be curvy and still be successful.”
Targeting future athletes
So important a factor is body type that it is being used to identify potential
champions for the London 2012 Olympics and beyond. In February, UK Sport and
the EIS launched a talent identification scheme, called Sporting Giants, in
which they urged potential athletes to come forward, providing they
fulfilled the criteria of being tall (a minimum of 6ft 3in or 190cm for men,
and 6ft or 180cm for women), young (between 16 and 25) and with some sort of
sporty background.
About 4,800 people responded within months. “Four thousand of the applicants
have since undergone physiological tests to assess their suitability for
Olympic sports requiring tall people,” says Garland. “We have whittled it
down to 60 who will be directed towards rowing, and some of the others will
be tested further to see if they have aptitude for volleyball or handball.”
Sporting Giants is our first big attempt to identify future Olympic champions.
It is a modern and more ethical take on the searches infamously carried out
in former Soviet bloc countries and China to identify genetic ability for
sport at an early age. Chelsea Warr, UK Sport’s talent identification lead
officer, who previously worked on the pioneering and highly successful
Australian Institute of Sport’s national talent search programme set up two
decades ago, says that physical characteristics are just part of the package.
Talent scouts are also looking for “games intelligence, the innate ability
some people have to be in the right place at the right time”, and
“coachability”, Warr says, both vital for future champions. Even then,
success isn’t guaranteed.
“It takes six to eight years of hard graft for a promising athlete to get to
the point where they can think about winning medals,” she says.
Still, there is already evidence that this sort of approach works. Garland
says that “talent recycling”, in which promising athletes are redirected to
sports more suitable to their body type, has been successful many times. He
cites the example of Anna Bebington, an all-round sportswoman who began
rowing at Cambridge University in 2001 when she was 18 to keep fit, but
because of her physique was picked out as having potential. She started
intensive training two years later and was competing for Great Britain in
the world championships by 2005. Likewise, Shelley Rudman switched from the
400m hurdles to take up skeleton bob four years before winning a silver
medal at the Winter Olympics. And Jason Queally made the transition from
water polo player to Olympic medal-winning track cyclist.
Enjoyment is the spur to success
Of course, there are always going to be exceptions. “In some sports, skill can
overcome physical limitations to a certain extent,” Professor Davison says.
“With game and team sports, this is especially true. Look at the
footlballers Peter Crouch and Michael Owen; both play the same position, but
they are incredibly different in stature.” Likewise, he says, there is huge
diversity within some sports that allows for different body types to excel.
“In cycling you get the very small cyclists who are better up hills and
mountains, the bigger guys who are great on the flat and in between are the
compact, muscular types who are built to win the Tour de France. In rugby
there are also opportunities for different body sizes to play in different
positions. So your natural build is not always a limiting factor.”
In most cases, Professor Davison says, stature and build should merely be used
as a guide. Well-meaning parents should certainly not push their child into
a sport simply because it seems to suit their body type. “A child will not
be successful at any sport if he or she doesn’t enjoy it,” says Professor
Davison. “They need to try as many sports as possible and develop as many
skills as they can. You may find that they become good at a sport they
enjoy, despite their size, or enjoy a sport they are good at because of
their size. Whichever it is, enjoyment will provide the inner motivation to
succeed.”
What shape are you? There are three classic body types. Although most
people are a mixture of two, you should be able to categorise yourself
according to the descriptions below:
Mesomorph Large bones and well-defined muscles, with even proportions.
Tend to excel at power-based sports such as sprinting, rugby and
weightlifting.
Endomorph Curvier with relatively short limbs, small hands and feet and
high waists. A higher percentage of body fat and less muscle. Best at
endurance-based sports, such as cross-Channel swimming.
Ectomorph Small build with low body fat and narrow hips, waists, ankles
and wrists. Tend to excel at distance running.
For details of Sporting Giants and other Talent ID schemes, contact www.uksport.gov.uk
THE DRIVER Lewis Hamilton
SPORT Formula One
HEIGHT 5ft 7in (1.74m)
WEIGHT 10st 5lb (68kg)
BUILD Few Formula One drivers are taller than 5ft 9in. Generally, the
thinner and lighter they are, the better. Not only does it improve the fit
in the tiny cockpit, but the downforce experienced as a Formula One car
grips the track means that the driver can be subjected to forces of five
times the pull of gravity, where his 70kg body suddenly weighs 350kg. Muscle
strength, especially in the neck, is also critical, so body fat percentage
is low.
THE SWIMMER Michael Phelps
SPORT Swimming
HEIGHT 6ft 4in (1.94cm)
WEIGHT 13st 7lb (88kg)
BUILD Phelps is tall and height is an advantage for a sprint swimmer.
Long bodies give swimmers an automatic edge when it comes to turning and
reaching for the finish. Phelps has size 14 feet, which act like paddles in
the water, and an arm span of two metres, which means that his stroke rate
is highly efficient.
THE ROWER James Cracknell
SPORT Rowing
HEIGHT 6ft 3in (1.93m)
WEIGHT 15st 7lb (100kg)
BUILD Rowers are classic mesomorph shapes (see box below) with broad
shoulders and long, muscular limbs, with low body fat. Although rowers’
musculature can make them heavy, the water buoys their boat and it doesn’t
hinder them moving through the water. Like distance runners, rowers have a
high aerobic capacity and are capable of taking in up to 300 litres of air a
minute.
THE RUNNER Paula Radcliffe
SPORT Distance running
HEIGHT 5ft 8in (1.73m)
WEIGHT 8st 7lb (54kg)
BUILD Although Radcliffe is taller than many world-class female
marathon runners (they average 5ft in to 5ft 6in), she has the classic
ectomorph physique (see box) of a distance runner, slim with a slight build,
having proportionately long legs and narrow hips. Being any taller could
have been a disadvantage. Distance running requires efficiency of movement
in lifting the body off the ground and propelling it forward with each
stride, and that becomes more difficult the taller and heavier someone is.
