We all want to be fitter, faster, stronger, and better at our athletic endeavors. But what if you could peer deep inside your genetics, your metabolism – the very proteins and molecules of you – to find prescriptive answers for how to achieve those aims?
A new theoretical research hopes to jumpstart just that type of effort, but to understand what these researchers have recently reported, we need some background context on where this field has been.
In 1953, the famed scientific duo of James Watson and Francis Crick – aided in no small part by the less well-known Rosalind Franklin – discovered the double helix structure of DNA, the blueprint for all life that lives inside every single living cell.
With that Nobel Prize-winning discovery elucidated, research into genetics and how life becomes and propagates life hit warp speed, leading in 1990 to the launching of the Human Genome Project, which aimed to map and sequence the entire human genome. The HGP promised to unlock the secrets of a vast array of diseases and conditions, one nucleotide at a time.
The staggering amounts of data this investigation yielded gave rise to the field of genomics, and from there, other types of omics developed.
The term “omics” refers to a field of study in biology and medicine that uses high-throughput technologies to analyze large sets of biological molecules. This can include DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolic compounds called metabolites. These technologies now allow researchers to study the molecular make-up of an organism or cell and gain a deeper view into complex biological processes and disease mechanisms.
In the early 2000s, researchers often focused on a single type of molecule or protein at a time, says Kayvan Khoramipour, a senior researcher with the i+HeALTH Strategic Research Group at Miguel De Cervantes European University in Valladolid, Spain. But given that there are thousands upon thousands of proteins that make up the human body and its many varied metabolic processes, piecing it all together one molecule at a time would take forever.
So, “a system-biology approach was raised, saying that it’s not enough to study just two or three proteins – we need to connect everything together and make a system,” he explains.
Now known as “omics,” this approach aimed to look at the body as a holistic system working within a specific environment. Omics has since been broken into four main categories:
Around that same time, about 30 years ago, renowned Brazilian biochemist L.C. Cameron, now an associated scientist with the Schroeder Arthritis Institute in the Krembil Research Institute at University Health Network in Toronto, Canada, became interested in studying how the brain reacts to hypoxia (lack of oxygen) and hypoglycemia (a lack of blood sugar). Both conditions can arise during certain medical emergencies, such as when you’re having a stroke.
As he dug into the science, he became extremely interested in ammonia, which the body produces in response to hypoxia and hypoglycemia. He started using exercise (a state of high stress on the body that can sometimes mimic a medical problem) as a model to understand why these conditions can lead to hyperammonemia (excess levels of ammonia in the blood). The idea was to gain a better understanding of hypermetabolic states that come with many health conditions.
To further this work, Cameron turned to the most elite athletes – Olympic medalists and their ilk – to find out how their bodies managed these states. Sometime around 2005, the Brazilian Olympic Committee invited him to join them in investigating how to forge even more elite performance through science.
Recognizing that there’s a vast difference between the results he could get inside a lab versus on an actual field of play, Cameron took his investigations into the less-controllable world of real conditions. “I brought the lab to the athletes and started to study them in real conditions,” he says.
Variables abounded and challenges ensued, naturally, but that all led to innovation and caused Cameron to begin looking at the athletes as a holistic entity functioning inside a dynamic environment. From weather changes and time of day to the fundamental stress differences between a training day and a race day, all the tiny details provided insight into how the human body responds to an ever-shifting set of stressors to create elite performance.
By the 2010s, Cameron and his team in Brazil had formally introduced the word “sportomics” to the scientific lexicon to describe the work they were doing using omics technology to study the effect of sports like football, volleyball, and handball on the whole metabolism of the human organism.
Eventually, Cameron, who was a long-term full professor of Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Federal University of the State of Rio De Janeiro in Brazil, became effectively the founding father in the sportomics field of research looking into the molecular effects of exercise. He pioneered several investigative pathways in sportomics and other types of omics research to answer the questions posed by the top athletes he observed every day.
“What we learned was that we could bring the omics perspective to sports,” he says. And they found some surprising things. For example, at the most elite levels, athletes can support higher levels of hyperammonemia than a person who has severe liver failure.
“So my idea was, can we learn from athletes?” Cameron says. Their sometimes superhuman-seeming ability to withstand physical stresses that most of us would not be able to tolerate could provide insight into treating people with conditions that create similar conditions through a disease process.
The studies and papers that resulted from this approach often had a cohort size of just a few athletes or even a single person, which is unusual for published science; typically, the larger the cohort, the more trustworthy the data. But at such elite levels, and in looking at such a complex and dynamic set of variables, it’s difficult to replicate the conditions and abilities of the athletes being studied. This makes meaningful comparisons between individuals difficult, but can produce highly-specific, prescriptive analysis for that one individual.
The insights Cameron and his team gleaned were nevertheless eye-opening and led him to create the Olympic Laboratory of the Brazilian Olympic Committee, where he directed the Department of Biochemistry and Sports for 12 years and served as a consultant in many doping cases involving elite athletes.
In short, he says the sportomics approach creates “several snapshots of an athlete, and after several snapshots, we can start to build a movie.” In keeping with the metaphor, as you collect more data, that movie grows in length, which could make it easier to see where and how to influence the plot to change the outcome.
A recent paper published by Khoramipour in collaboration with Professor Katsuhiko Suzuki from the Faculty of Sport Sciences, Waseda University, Japan, and other authors, seeks to further differentiate how different types of exercise affect the body.
They’ve done this by introducing the concepts of “enduromics” and “resistomics,” which recognize that endurance exercise and resistance-based exercise have vastly different impacts on the body.
Khoramipour, who grew up playing basketball and was a basketball strength and conditioning coach in his native Iran before moving to Spain for his research work, says this stratification of terms in the sportomics field gives researchers like him more tools to work with when studying the impact of exercise on the body.
This new approach also helps them understand how to leverage training for the best outcome while potentially improving overall health and wellness through targeted interventions.
These terms and the approaches they describe add more precision to the field. “I think these resistomics and enduromics could provide us with more molecular-based understanding of different kinds of exercise,” Khoramipour says. “With previous methods, we can know about the superficial data we can get from exercise, but with this, we can go deeper to the molecular level.”
This approach also helps simplify a complicated area of study. For example, sports like handball and basketball are complex activities that involve running, jumping, coordination, strength, flexibility, and a whole bunch of other skills. That complexity makes it difficult to tease out the fine strands of which movement is producing which biological results.
But by focusing endurance sports or resistance sports through the lens of resistomics and enduromics, this could help researchers distill the concept of “sport” or “exercise” into less complex, easier-to-quantify effects that can then be applied to a wider range of sports, activities, and overall health questions.
Categorizing findings based on the different types of exercise can also make the findings more meaningful for other researchers as well as athletes aiming to improve performance.
For high-performance and elite athletes, these new approaches could help them achieve new heights, Khoramipour says. One place they’ve done this is by looking at lactate levels in the blood. “We previously used lactate threshold to say, ‘this training in the range of aerobic exercise,’ but this is a very general, superficial concept.”
But enduromics and resistomics can help them go deeper to the molecular level of what’s happening in the body when you get to that same level of lactate.
“Using these two methods on elite athletes, we can go deeper in terms of adaptation by exercise or responses to the exercise to see what happened at the molecular level,” he says.
This type of fine-grain analysis of the biochemistry of what your body produces before, during, and after exercise could open up whole new horizons in pinpointing the tiny changes in training, nutrition, sleep, and so on, that are necessary to boost performance from, say, being one of the best in the country to being one of the best in the world.
In short, these approaches could lead to a very specific training prescription.
The sportomics approach creates ‘several snapshots of an athlete, and after several snapshots, we can start to build a movie.’
Cameron tells the story of one athlete for whom this approach helped. The athlete had achieved technical perfection, but he wasn’t quite at the top of his sport yet. The athlete’s coach was stymied by his seeming inability to make that final incremental improvement and suggested he gain about 2 kilograms of muscle mass in hopes that would help. But it just didn’t seem to be happening.
They called in Cameron and his team, who followed this athlete for 10 days and cataloged everything he did for about 16 hours a day. “The only thing that we didn’t do was sleep with him,” Cameron says.
The athlete typically trained in the morning and had lunch at the training center, then walked about 5 minutes back to his apartment, where he had 3 or 4 hours to himself. He’d often play video games during that time, before returning to the training center for an afternoon workout, after which he’d have dinner at the center and go back to his apartment. At night, he’d play video games, talk on the phone with his wife, pray, and usually go to bed around 11 p.m. or midnight.
At the end of the 10-day observation period, Cameron and his team made a few small dietary suggestions. But they noticed something seemingly insignificant that may have made all the difference come competition season.
“What we realized is that he was having a burst of adrenaline because of the video games. This was OK in the afternoon, but not at night,” Cameron says. So going forward, the advice was to turn off the TV, the phone, and any other screens after 9 p.m. From that point on, he could read a book, talk to his wife, listen to music, or pray – those things were all fine. But the video games were off limits.
Cameron also recommends that in the afternoon, the athlete should avoid video games for at least one hour after he comes home from training. During that time, he could take a nap, read a book, or do whatever else he wanted – just avoid doing anything that could spike his adrenaline for one hour to give his body time to come down from his training session.
“The idea was to prepare his metabolism to rest and to build the things that he needed,” Cameron says.
The athlete made those changes along with a few dietary changes, and “he won the gold medal,” Cameron recalls. While it’s impossible to say for sure what exactly made that happen, Cameron’s hunch seems to have proven effective for this particular athlete.
Quitting video games might not be a massive revelation for your next race, but the point is, there are so many variables and inputs, the smallest thing you don’t even realize you’re doing might be detrimental to performance. Insights into the minuscule changes that could make an immense improvement could be in the cards for all of us in the not-too-distant future.
Researchers are also looking to these precision fields to support healthy aging. Khoramipour notes that older adults, especially those with chronic conditions that affect metabolism, such as diabetes, might especially benefit from the insights they can glean from omics. Female athletes navigating hormonal fluctuations associated with the menstrual cycle, perimenopause, and menopause may also find that an omics approach could help them get more out of each training session to perform better, no matter when the competition happens.
“By the omics method, we can know the effect of hormone changes in the biology and then we can interpret it. And then we can design a training program based on that information.” Khoramipour says. “We believe that we can get a better result and a very personalized exercise precision.”
It all comes back to precision, Khoramipour says. Consider that we’ve long used heart rate as a superficial measure to provide an idea of someone’s wellness level, but depending on the individual’s health situation, it may not always give a reliable picture; diseases, medications, stress, hydration levels, infection, and many other factors can drastically impact heart rate and provide a skewed sense of what’s going on in a given observational period.
Instead, “by looking at the whole body as a system and using a deeper approach, you can know exactly what’s happening in the body in response to exercise and design a more individualized program for this person,” Khoramipour says.
In the future, perhaps your smartwatch will track specific biomarkers and monitor post-exercise changes to determine whether your workout was effective – and offer recommendations to make the next one more impactful.
As we learn more about the various molecules and compounds involved in the body’s exercise response, such prescriptive programs could become much more commonplace – responses to stress, sleep, dietary inputs, and other fine details might all be quantifiable in the not-too-distant future.
Right now, such granular understanding is expensive to procure, so it’s only available to the most elite of athletes chasing world records at the highest levels. But it’s not entirely science fiction to believe your smartwatch or another device might one day be able to analyze a bunch of biometrics and spit out a uniquely tailored training plan that could help you move from the ranks of also-ran to age-group podium finisher or Kona qualifier.
“I think we need to be more precise about everything, so I hope we can one day translate all this science into application,” Khoramipour says.
