DNA Testing for Fitness and Nutrition
Andrew Steele
Andrew Steele (UK)
Olympic Athlete, Founder & Head of Product @ DNAFit
Andrew Steele is an Olympic athlete, running the 400m and 4x400m for Great Britain. Having competed internationally for over 12 years Andrew is one of the most experienced athletes on Team GB, having been part of national teams at European, Commonwealth, World and Olympic level. Alongside his training for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, Andrew is also one of the founding members and Head of Product for personal genetics company DNAFit, specialising in DNA testing for fitness and nutrition, to create genetically-guided training and dietary interventions.
Andrew Steele, an Olympic track and field athlete and co-founder of DNAFIT
You don’t really learn anything from winning; you only really learn something from failing. This experience led me to discover more about who I am, how I am made, what works for me, and what doesn’t.
Summary
- Genetic data is not for talent identification or predicting success; it is a tool for informing training and nutrition rather than a deterministic or diagnostic final answer. - Performance results from the interaction between nature and nurture, meaning training and diet must be tailored to an individual’s genetic profile to achieve the best possible outcomes. - Markers like the ACTN3 gene influence muscle fiber growth, explaining why some people thrive on endurance-based training while others require a power-based approach to see improvements. - Useful genetic testing focuses on actionable SNPs related to fitness, such as VO2 max trainability, recovery speed, injury risk, and specific nutritional requirements. - Evidence shows that genetically matched training programs can yield significantly higher performance gains than mismatched programs by replacing unreliable assumptions with data.
Article
DNA Testing For Fitness And Nutrition
Andrew Steele’s Case For A More Personal Science Of Performance
At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Andrew Steele did not sell genetics as destiny. He did something more useful and more difficult. He argued for restraint.
Steele, the Olympic 400m runner for Great Britain and founder and Head of Product at DNAFit, used his presentation, *DNA Testing for Fitness and Nutrition*, to challenge both the hype surrounding consumer genetics and the laziness of one-size-fits-all training culture. His central claim was measured but potent: genetic data, used carefully, can help athletes and ordinary people make better decisions about how to train and eat. It cannot predict greatness. It cannot identify talent with certainty. And it should never be mistaken for fate.
“Genetics is not about talent ID or predicting the future,” Steele said. “It is about using data to influence how we choose to work out and eat with a much better information base than we previously had.”
That distinction mattered. In an age already seduced by personalised everything, Steele’s message was not that DNA offered magic. It was that it offered context.
The Failure That Became The Argument
The most compelling part of Steele’s talk was not the molecular biology. It was the biography.
He framed the science through the story of his own athletic career, and particularly through a painful reversal. Steele had reached the semi-finals of the 400m at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, running 44.94 and showing the hallmark of an endurance-leaning quarter-miler: a relatively weaker start, then a powerful finish. In his telling, that race revealed both his strengths and his limitations.
The 400m, he reminded the audience, is among the most brutal events in athletics, demanding speed, stamina and the ability to survive an almost total physiological collapse over the final straight. Athletes and coaches have long disagreed on how best to train for it. One camp builds from endurance toward speed, the so-called long-to-short method. The other keeps sprint qualities alive year-round, layering endurance on top of raw pace.
Steele had been shaped by the first model. It was less glamorous, more grinding, and in his case, highly effective. But after Beijing, with London 2012 looming, he and those around him made what seemed the rational choice. If the world’s best 400m runners were training more like sprinters, perhaps he should too. If he could sharpen the first half of his race, perhaps the missing half-second between semi-finalist and medallist would arrive.
Instead, everything unravelled.
Over the next four years, Steele grew slower rather than faster. Illness intervened. So did injury. He suffered glandular fever and a partial Achilles tendon rupture. By the time the London Olympic selection came around, he was ranked seventh in Britain. Six places were available. He missed the home Games entirely.
There was no neatness in the way he told this. No motivational speaker’s tidy redemption arc. He described it as a failure, and the honesty gave the science that followed an unusual credibility. His argument for individualized training did not come from a lab alone. It came from the consequences of getting it wrong.
Why Nature Versus Nurture Was The Wrong Question
Steele dismissed one of the oldest public arguments in sport with a line that cut through decades of false binaries.
“Nature versus nurture is a nonsense question because it is such a complex picture,” he said. “We must consider the interaction between how we are made and what we do to give ourselves the best possible outcome.”
This was the philosophical backbone of the talk. Performance, he argued, emerges from interaction. Genetics matter, but only as one part of a far larger system that includes training history, access to facilities, culture, motivation, preference, injury burden and environment.
His examples were deliberately simple. A person could possess extraordinary sprint-related genetics and still never become a sprinter if their surroundings never allowed the possibility. Another could thrive in a culture, such as Jamaica’s school sprint system, where competition, aspiration and social meaning sharpen performance irrespective of any one gene.
“We must not consider genetics as a deterministic factor,” Steele said. “It is one piece of the puzzle that helps us make actionable lifestyle changes to support our body’s unique expression and response to the environment.”
That line captured the practical ethic of the presentation. DNA, in this view, was not prophecy. It was a decision-making aid.
What Genetic Data Could Actually Do
Steele was especially alert to overstatement, perhaps because overstatement had become the industry’s native language. At DNAFit, he said, a large part of the job involved “managing expectations”.
The company’s work focused on fitness and nutrition markers rather than medical diagnosis or grand predictions. The relevant question was not whether a gene could tell someone they would become the next Usain Bolt. It was whether a cluster of variants could help guide training and dietary choices more intelligently than guesswork alone.
“Genetics is a small part of the picture, but without it, you do not have the full picture,” Steele said. “Knowing this data allows you to make a better assumption on the best way to train or eat to reveal your true potential.”
In practice, that meant looking at markers associated with power or endurance response, VO2 max trainability, recovery speed, injury predisposition and nutritional needs. But he stressed that even this had to be done conservatively. Any genetic variant worth reporting, he argued, had to satisfy three conditions: there must be consensus in peer-reviewed research, the evidence must come from human studies, and the result must be actionable.
That final word, actionable, was crucial. Steele rejected the use of genetic information that merely alarmed or flattered. If the data could not lead to a practical adjustment in training load, nutritional strategy, recovery or injury prevention, then its value was questionable.
The ACTN3 Gene And The Limits Of The Myth
No gene in sports genetics has attracted more attention than ACTN3, and Steele confronted it directly.
The gene is associated with the production of a protein involved in fast-twitch muscle function. Certain variants have been found at very high frequency among elite sprinters, making ACTN3 a favourite of those eager to discover a “speed gene”. Steele acknowledged the association while also puncturing the mythology around it.
Most Olympic sprinters who have been genotyped possess the variant linked to sprint performance. But so do large numbers of people who will never run internationally, or indeed competitively at all. The gene may influence response. It does not issue guarantees.
For Steele, the lesson was personal. He described himself as an anomaly of sorts, an Olympic-level quarter-miler whose own genetic profile may have made him less naturally responsive to the sprint-heavy training model he adopted before London 2012. If ACTN3 affects how efficiently fast-twitch fibres develop under high-intensity training, then pushing every athlete toward the same “optimal” regime risks turning fashion into self-sabotage.
“Every athlete needs to approach their training in an individualized way,” he said. “Using genetic data allows us to move away from unquantified assumptions and toward a more tailored approach to reaching our goals.”
The Promise, If Used Carefully
Steele closed his case with emerging evidence rather than anecdote alone. He pointed to research using a genetic-based algorithm for personalised resistance training, in which athletes placed on genetically matched programmes improved performance markers by nearly three times as much as those on mismatched plans.
That result, while hardly the final word, underscored the principle at the heart of his presentation: not everyone adapts to the same stimulus in the same way. Some thrive on power work. Others respond more strongly to endurance-oriented progressions. Some recover quickly. Others need longer. Some can tolerate repeated high-intensity loading. Others break down.
In elite sport, those distinctions can shape medals and missed teams. In everyday life, they may determine whether a person gets fitter, gets injured, or gives up.
Steele’s message at Biohacker Summit 2016 London was not evangelical. It was corrective. Against the arrogance of universal plans and the fantasy of genetic certainty, he offered a narrower but more humane vision of performance science. Not prediction, but calibration. Not destiny, but better odds.
In a culture still hungry for shortcuts, that sounded almost radical.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 London