Just for the record I 'was' being sarcastic..
I took the scratching of the chin to mean you were still wondering if there was such a test.
Correct me if I'm wrong as I'm sure you will but it seems to me that when we start talking about a lot of things to do with the human body/health/fitness/nutrition, it'll always be a very long time for scientists to be able to say with certainty that x+y = z. The best you can ever really hope for in some cases are strong correlations.
That is very much the nature of science, you have paradigms/models for viewing the world around you and go out and test the predictions based on that model, if the results match the predictions it lends support that the hypothesis is correct. If evidence accumulates that the paradigm/model is wrong then the hypothesis is revised.
We follow training and nutrition protocols all the time that aren't scientifically 'proven' - some of the better training ideas out there no doubt based on scientific method, is backed up by previous training methodologies that have seemed to work and are based on established physiological research, and have a bunch of data from other climbers showing correlation with 'improvement x'. But I doubt that any of it is 'proven' to the scientific standards that are being discussed here.
I think it's normal for people to be attracted to the idea of finding out if they posses 'xyz' (or GCTA..) which in some tests has shown to be correlated to 'outcome abc'. Little harm in it as long as you possess healthy skepticism and a clear understanding of the limitations.
And therein lies the problem, the vast majority of people do not possess healthy skepticism nor do they think in complex terms because its just not at all simple in any way shape or form. Hell many people still believe in deities and don't dare to question their beliefs? There is actually huge scope for harm from unregulated genetic tests such as these, 23andme were prevented from providing any information on the association of genotypes with disease risk by the FDA in the US, although that has been
relaxed a bit. Why is it harmful? Because its not a simple relationship and the vast majority of people don't understand the context of the information, nor will they be interested in learning it.
Most medical/nutritional/training research follows the research paradigm proposed by Rose in his book
The strategy of preventive medicine where in essence you look at a sample from a population, if you can affect a change in the populations distribution, e.g. shifting the mean cholesterol levels (which are a predictor for risk of cardiovascular diseases) downwards, then everyone will be "better off". The implicit assumption is that this change in the population parameter (the mean) is because everyone's reduced a little. This very often won't be the case though, out of your sample you may have some with very high cholesterol whose levels were dramatically reduced (this will also reduce the variance/standard deviation). In essence and this is at the heart of your question, not everyone is the same, nor responds the same. A paper from last year goes into this in greater detail...
The idea of uniform change: is it time to revisit a central tenet of Rose's "Strategy of Preventive Medicine" (the full PDF is available from various sources including a certain illegal Russian site that has a mirror hosted in Brazil). This has led in recent years to notions of "repsonders" v's "non-responders" and the panacea of
Personalised MedicineBack to your original question though...
Before asking what determinants might predict training response I'd say a step or two back needs to be taken and an estimate of the heritability, if any, of training response needs to be obtained. This isn't straight-forward as off-spring share 50% of their genetics with each parent
and they very often share the same environment, so you need to disentangle nature and nurture. A classic approach to this in animals is selective breeding, not so popular in humans, so the alternative of
Twin Studies are employed. Thing is the money available for doing much of this research simply does not exist, big players are cancer and dementia research as the demographics of the populations shift as they age.
Speculate and cogitate to your hearts content and remain skeptical of anything you read, but Science
TM won't have any climbing specific answers any time soon. Tom and his Lattice pals are taking a fairly systematic approach to collating and analysing data so that might reveal some interesting avenues on the training front, but they won't obtain blood samples and consent from the hundreds of thousands of people required to perform Whole Genome Screen Associations.
If you are really, really interested in learning more about human genetics I can highly recommend Strachan and Read's
Human Molecular Genetics, it was reading this course textbook for a module of the same name at undergraduate rather than attending the boring lectures that got me interested and set me on my path of employment. Its very accessible and older versions (I still have a copy of the first edition) are still highly relevant and cheaper.
And as an aside here's a paper I came across on a
tiny study on nutrition and recovery in climbers, but the sample size is so small that the conclusions are effectively useless...
Potter, Julia A and Fuller, Belinda (2014) The Effectiveness of Chocolate milk as a Post-Climbing Recovery Aid. Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, epub. ISSN 0022-4707 (In Press)Its great that someone has learnt how to do research for their Masters thesis but to suggests such tiny studies have the same credibility as larger more rigorous research is a discredit to Science
TM and increasingly the validity of that hallowed status for understanding the world is being eroded, helped in no small part by people wanting incredibly complex topics boiled down to sound bites and headlines that give a binary answer. Such papers should not be permitted to be published in peer-reviewed journals at all in my view.
