CUR R E N T OP I N I O N Open Access
Can the ability to adapt to exercise be
considered a talent—and if so, can we test
for it?
Craig Pickering
1,2*
and John Kiely
1
Abstract
Talent identification (TI) is a popular and hugely important topic within sports performance, with an ever-increasing
amount of resources dedicated to unveiling the next sporting star. However, at present, most TI processes appear
to select high-performing individuals at the present point in time, as opposed to identifying those individuals with
the greatest capacity to improve. This represents a potential inefficiency within the TI process, reducing its effectiveness. In
this article, we discuss whether the ability to adapt favorably, and with a large magnitude, to physical training
can be considered a talent, testing it against proposed criteria. We also discuss whether, if such an ability can
be considered a talent, being able to test for it as part of the TI process would be advantageous. Given that
such a capacity is partially heritable, driven by genetic variation between individuals that mediate the adaptive response,
we also explore whether the information gained from genetic profiling can be used to identify those with the greatest
capacity to improve. Although there are some ethical hurdles which must be considered, the use of genetic information
to identify those individuals with the greatest capacity appears to hold promise and may improve both the efficiency and
effectiveness of contemporary TI programmes.
Key points
1. Talent identification programmes often identify
those with the greatest current ability, as opposed to
the greatest capacity to improve.
2. This capacity to improve is linked to physical
adaptation to exercise, which is partially genetically
mediated.
3. Genetic profiling holds promise in being able to
identify those individuals with the greatest capacity
to improve, as well as the best methods through
which to yield these improvements.
Background
The accurate identification of youth sporting talent has, in
recent decades, emerged as a hugely important and yet
controversial topic [1, 2]. Interest in talent identification
(TI) is illustrated by a growing academic literature [1–3],
along with a number of best-selling popular-science books
on the topic [4–7]. Traditionally, sporting TI programmes
have, through a mix of subjective and objective tests,
sought to identify young athletes with “talent,” using this
identification as a prediction of adult performance. How-
ever, despite the massive allocation of resources into the
identification and development of young talent, it remains
unclear whether or not early TI processes are either em-
pirically justified or practically effective.
One fundamental limiting factor is that physical per-
formance tests employed to discern between those who
have the talent to excel in the future, and those who do
not, actually only provide a snapshot of current abilities.
The subsequent logical leap is the presumption that those
who perform well at that given time are most likely to be
successful as adults. Yet, due to the inherently non-linear
complex nature of biological maturation, these perform-
ance snapshots offer inherently poor predictive value. As
an illustration, within athletes competing in the 2012
Olympic 100 m final, personal bests at age 18 ranged from
10.27–10.48 s. In comparison, one of this paper’sauthors
(CP) ran 10.22 s at this age, faster than all the finalists.
* Correspondence: craig@dnafit.com
1
Institute of Coaching and Performance, School of Sport and Wellbeing,
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
2
Exercise and Nutritional Genomics Research Centre, DNAFit Ltd, London, UK
© The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Pickering and Kiely Sports Medicine - Open (2017) 3:43
DOI 10.1186/s40798-017-0110-3
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