Whenever you watch a professional sport team, you know exactly how impressive these elite athletes can be. From reacting instantly to their ever-changing surroundings to performing incredible feats of strength and speed, their performance comes, in part, from their physical agility.

While the vast majority of that ability comes from intense training and dedication, pro athletes may also have had a leg up from the genetic lottery. Even if you’re not an elite athlete, physical agility still plays an important role in day-to-day activities at any age and across different fitness levels. What does your DNA suggest about your physical agility? An AncestryDNA^® + Traits test can give you answers.

How Does Agility Affect Fitness Activities?

Agility refers to your ability to change direction in response to a stimulus without losing control of your body. Key components of agility include:

• Speed
• Coordination
• Anticipation
• Reaction time

Agility requires sharp physical reflexes and quick mental processing to allow you to respond to stimuli around you. It influences movements such as jumping, sprinting, and dancing, for example.

In sport activities like basketball, players need to be able to modulate their speed and direction to navigate around their opponents and coordinate with their teammates. A cyclist needs agility to react to unexpected obstacles, such as traffic or animals on the road. And surfing and snowboarding both require you to adjust to the unpredictable terrain in front of you.

Physical agility is also part of daily activities like quickly shifting directions at the last minute in order to avoid bumping into someone on the pavement. And you’d need agility to react quickly if you noticed a toddler getting too close to potential dangers like a set of stairs or the edge of a swimming pool.

Agility and Genetics

Ancestry^® scientists sought to find out how genetics and agility relate by conducting a study that compared the DNA of people with different self-reported agility levels. The scientists then performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to compare the DNA of over 157,000 people who answered the question, "How would you rate your physical agility?" The question specified thinking of agility in terms of the ability to quickly make movements, like changing direction.

By comparing the survey responses and DNA data of the study participants, the scientists found 525 DNA markers that were associated with peoples’ reported agility. The scientists used those DNA markers, in combination with people’s agility data, to calculate a polygenic risk score—a tool to predict your physical agility based on your genetics.

Overall, no specific sets of agility genes make you a star performer without any training. Rather, genetics create a sort of threshold for the ability while your actual agility level is predominantly determined by environmental influences.

Environmental Influences on Agility

Importantly, Ancestry scientists found that differences in people’s DNA could only explain a small amount of the variation in their physical agility—about 7%. That means that non-genetic factors, like training and conditioning, influence your agility much more than your genetics.

Two key components of agility can be influenced by your environment:

• Physical reaction time refers to how quickly you can physically respond to it.
• Mental reaction time is how quickly you can perceive and process a stimulus.

Practice becomes key to improving your physical reaction time as it trains your body to respond and your mind to process quicker. Many forms of agility training focus on improving physical reaction times. One study revealed that certain types of training, such as a combination of sprinting, plyometrics, and resistance training, improved agility more effectively than change-of-direction exercises alone.

One of the biggest ways to improve mental reaction time is an every-day activity: sleep. Lack of sleep is well-known to decrease physical speed and reaction time. Without these, overall agility also declines, at least temporarily.

Interesting Findings About Agility

Agility naturally increases with age from early childhood into adolescence. Part of this comes from the natural maturation youth go through as they develop. They become more capable of quickly responding to stimuli around them, which helps improve agility.

Interestingly, a 2023 study of 496 French participants revealed that those who played video games showed higher rates of mental flexibility and visual-spatial processing skills, both of which are important to the reaction time portion of agility. That’s no surprise, given how important reaction time is to many fast-paced games that require tracking, responding, and hand-eye coordination. However, gaming alone won't improve agility. The cognitive aspects are just one of two sides of the agility coin. Without proper training in the physical aspects, the speed and strength necessary for agile movements like rapidly changing directions or adjusting to your surroundings won't develop.

Are you interested in how your genes and agility interplay? After taking an AncestryDNA^® + Traits test, you'll gain insight into your genetic makeup, including whether you have genes likely to influence your agility and other athletic abilities. If you've already taken an AncestryDNA test, those results are available to review with an Ancestry^® membership.

 

References

"Agility: Improve your Agility for Everyday Life." Design Your Life. Accessed April 17, 2024. https://www.designyourlife.net.au/blog/agility.

Forster, James W. D., Aaron M. Uthoff, et al. "Training to Improve Pro-Agility Performance: A Systematic Review." Journal of Human Kinetics. January 4, 2023. doi:10.2478/hukin-2022-0108.

Fry, Alexa, and Dr. Anis Rehman. "Sleep, Athletic Performance, and Recovery." Sleep Foundation. December 13, 2023. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/physical-activity/athletic-performance-and-sleep.

Martinez, Léa, et al. "Video games and board games: Effects of playing practice on cognition." PloS One. March 27, 2023. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0283654.

Thieschäfer, Lutz, and Dirk Büsch. "Development and trainability of agility in youth: A systematic scoping review." Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. September 8, 2022. doi:10.3389/fspor.2022.952779.