A combination of all of these factors determines our body type, not an anachronistic and limited classification system. By being active and looking after your body, you improve its ability to gain muscle and lose fat. During strength training, you build your fast-twitch and intermediate fibers' muscle which increases muscle size.įinally your lifestyle plays a considerable role. With endurance activities like running and HIIT, you train the slow twitch muscle fibers and can develop some “ectomorphic” traits such as low body fat and lean muscles. Our individual differences are affected by our training method, frequency, and intensity. The impressively lean bodies of long-distance runners and the powerful muscles of weightlifters were not genetically determined, but forged on the training ground. ![]() Training can also affect individual differences. These characteristics combine to form a very individual body type. We also inherit traits from our relatives and, at an individual level, we all have unique characteristics such as the proportion of muscle fiber types and the length of our limbs. At a macro level, some characteristics are influenced by our DNA and ethnic heritage. Genetics play a considerable role in determining individual differences. Where do our individual differences come from? An endomorph could believe that they can't lose weight, when, with a few lifestyle changes, there’s no reason why they couldn’t. Someone considered an ectomorph might think that it’s impossible for them to ever gain strength, so they never even bother trying. ![]() Lastly, by restricting us to fixed types, it limits our perception of what we can achieve. We change and evolve, so many of the "gifted" mesomorph athletes were formerly endomorphs or ectomorphs. The second issue is that this classification system isn’t fixed. Every one of the seven billion people on earth has a slightly different body type. The first problem is that this system is an oversimplification we can't classify body types into just three classes. Start your training Ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph: The problems of putting people in boxes ![]() Nevertheless, this classification system is still seen as the benchmark by many in the fitness community. Within just a few years, psychologists started to discredit this theory. Finally, mesomorphs were a combination of both naturally athletic, high-responders and equipped to lose fat and gain muscle. In contrast, endomorphs were seen as strong, larger and able to gain muscle quickly. In the 1940s, American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon developed a classification system for the human body, in which he claimed that all people were either ectomorphs, mesomorphs or endomorphs.Įctomorphs were defined as slender, lean and best suited to endurance activities. While it’s true that we each tend towards a particular body type, individual differences actually play a far more important role in determining our body types, as training specialist Florian Nock explains. There’s a common belief that we fall into one of 3 body type categories we're either ectomorph, mesomorph or endomorph.
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