Unable to shed weight after hours of gymming? Blame your genes!

The study suggests that health benefits of physical activity could be strongly linked to our genes and can substantially vary between individuals.

The researchers are hopeful that findings could pave the way for alternative treatments such as a simple blood test that could suggest whether one should take up strenuous physical activity or focus on other ways of staying healthy such as through diet, medication etc.

Details of the study
An international research team from across 14 institutions led by University of London studied 600 people to come up with these findings.

For the study, the participants were asked to undergo vigorous aerobic training for 30 minutes, five days a week.

At the end of the study, majority of the participants demonstrated an improvement in their oxygen uptake while they underwent physical activity.

However, 20 percent of the participants were unable to avail any health benefits despite weeks of sweating out, as they showed their maximum oxygen increase by less than five percent, a negligible improvement.

Additionally, 30 percent showed no increase in the insulin activity, indicating that physical workout did not cut back their diabetes risk.

Muscle tissue samples studied
The researchers also examined the human genomes of the study subjects to determine who would benefit the most from exercising.

They took the muscle tissue samples of the participants before and after the study to test their oxygen uptake.

Using this procedure, the researchers identified a set of 30 genes that are closely correlated with changes in aerobic/physical activity and the amount of oxygen consumed by the body.

Of these, 11 of the genes were shown to have a particular impact on how much a person could benefit from exercise.

Around one in every five among those tested had a combination of these genes called the “unfitness genes,” implying that their oxygen uptake hardly changed despite weeks of workout.

James Timmons of the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, said, “We know that low maximal oxygen consumption is a strong risk factor for premature illness and death so the tendency is for public health experts to automatically prescribe aerobic exercise to increase oxygen capacity.

"Our hope is that before too long, they will be able to target that prescription just to those who may stand a greater chance of benefiting, and prescribe more effective preventive or therapeutic measures to the others.

“If a patient is not likely to benefit much from aerobic exercise, the physician could turn to other types of exercise or alternative therapies. This would be one of the first examples of personalized, genomic-based medicine.”

Findings of the study appear in the Journal of Applied Physiology.