Epigenetics and the Modern Athlete: The Hidden Inheritance of Performance

Epigenetics and the Modern Athlete: The Hidden Inheritance of Performance

by Laura M. Wilde, Founder of Sports Energy Medicine™ and Holistic Mental Performance™

We keep asking athletes to “lock in,” but no one asks what’s already locked inside them.

When a player steps to the line and their body tightens, this means the breath shortens, the fascia grips and they feel the pressure. We often call this nerves. These so-called nerves are based on a memory in the mind/body. Not personal memory, but blood memory.

The good news? Science has finally named what the body has always known: trauma leaves a biological signature.

Have you heard about this study? At Emory University, researchers taught mice to fear the scent of cherry blossoms by pairing it with a shock. Generations later, their descendants still flinched at that smell. The experience rewrote the genome’s rhythm.

That’s what happens in humans, too. For some of us, it’s smell and for others it is the sound of a crowd, the slam of a door, a coach’s bark through a PA system — signals the body mistakes for something much older.

For descendants of enslaved or oppressed peoples, those sounds once meant danger. Command. Capture. So when the arena roars, the DNA listens, and sometimes, it braces and holds the tension. Breathwork training combined with Sports Energy Medicine Sessions can help the athlete release these epigenetic markers.