Pieces of the puzzle

Lia asked the question "was the outlay of the Gene Elite Test worth it?" I can only answer this from my perspective, and I guess the answer lies in those evasive words it depends.

Over the past 12 months as my ranking and experience has been increasing, my coach and I are always reading and talking to people about how to improve, and we have found many different ideas on training, nutrition, and recovery. It is fair to say that elite athletes and their coaches in the same sport can have extremely different approaches yet they can all be highly successful. Why is this? From what I can tell it is because we are all different, and our minds and bodies react differently to training, food and recovery methods. There is no "one size fits all" approach to any of these things. In Precision Nutrition, John Beradi talks about the importance of individualisation of his program, and I think this is the key.

It is important to understand the fundamentals of the sport, or work, you are doing. You need to apply sound principles to your nutrition and recovery strategies and you need to mould these around your indivual requirements. This should give you a unique program that works best for you. But the question is "how do you know what level of personalisation you need". The truth is most of the time we are guessing, and often those guesses can be based in incorrect beliefs about how our bodies work guided by our minds.

With current technology and scientific studies we can take the guess work out of it. We can find out if we are carb tolerant, or how well we are likely to recover and what mix of training is going to be optimal. These types if tests are sinply information that can be interpreted and used to increase your performance.

So was the Gene Elite and similar scientific based tests worth the outlay? As I said at the beginning of this post it depends on what you want your outcome to be. For me? I was beaten to a Gold Medal by 200gms of body weight in December.......yes it is worth it.

Lisa