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Faye Prior | 2014-05-28 04:33:29
More and more research is published every month trying to uncover the links between our genetics and exercise. Up to now this was predominantly towards the view that having certain genes makes us excel at sport, and more likely to benefit from regular exercise. But now researchers from the University of Missouri are exploring the hypothesis that our genes could also decide how motivated we are to exercise.
This would seem a valid line of enquiry, because amongst your group of friends you’re bound to find friends who just seem to love to exercise, or love to play the guitar, or just can’t stand to get out of bed, so maybe our genetics could explain this.
In their experiments with rats, the researchers identified rats who seemed to exercise a lot and those who seemed to be very lazy. They then bred ten generations of exercising rats with other exercising rats, and lazy rats with other lazy rats. They found that the rats bred from the exercising group were 10 times more likely to choose to exercise than those rats bred from the lazy group. These rats also matured quicker, showing faster brain development than lazy rats.
The fact that the rats bred from exercisers were 10 times more likely to exercise voluntarily shows a good link to support a genetic predisposition to be motivated to exercise, for rats anyway, especially in the absence of all the environmental influences that we humans are exposed to which can motivate us too.
However I must concur that the attitudes of my family members towards exercise makes my motivation to exercise seem comparable to that of a gold winning Olympic medallist. There is seemingly no genetic predisposition to exercise motivation in the Prior household, with the scales tipping towards the influence of the environment rather than genetics.
Faye Prior (Researcher)
Source
Roberts, M., Toedebusch, R., Wells, K., Company, J., Brown, J. et al. (2014). Nucleus accumbens neuronal maturation differences in young rats bred for low versus high voluntary running behaviour. Journal of Physiology, Publish ahead of print March 24th.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/5Xsqas