Endurance or Power Leaning

Your result, the one DNA position behind it, and what the research says.

7/10 confidence.

About Endurance or Power Leaning

ACE is best known for regulating blood vessel tone, but the same enzyme influences muscle efficiency and fiber composition. A long-studied insertion or deletion in the gene sets how much enzyme circulates, and this position travels with it closely enough to read it. Endurance athletes are somewhat enriched for the lower-enzyme version and power athletes for the higher, across many small studies. It is the most-studied performance variant there is, and also a good lesson in how modest such effects turn out to be once studies get large.

Good to know: This is the most-studied performance variant, and the effect is still small. The most common result is the one with no lean at all. Training and practice dominate athletic outcome by an enormous margin.

Fun fact: The ACE insertion/deletion has been studied in everyone from Olympic rowers to Himalayan mountaineers, and the effect size keeps shrinking as the studies get bigger.

Discovery: The ACE insertion/deletion was linked to endurance performance in a study of mountaineers and army recruits in 1998.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: ACE

Variant (rsID): rs4341

Location: Chr 17:63,488,629

dbSNP rs4341

The studies

Physical Performance and Sports Genetics: A Systematic Review of Candidate Gene Polymorphisms Involved in Team Sports (Mijaica R et al., Genes, 2025)

Effect Size and Replicability in Genetic Studies of Athletic Performance: A Meta-Analytical Review (Łosińska KW et al., Genes, 2025)

Other lifestyle traits

Joint Flexibility: A variant in a collagen gene that helps set how stiff or supple your tendons and ligaments are.

Lactate Clearance: A change in the transporter that carries lactate into the muscle and heart tissue that burns it as fuel.

Training Response: A change in the gene for the signal that grows new blood vessels, looked at for how people adapt to different kinds of training.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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