When you look at the human shape and compare the huge variations to different sports, the research in this subject is not very good. There are exceptions at some of the extreme ends of some shapes, but overall there are too many other factors that athletes have that makes some of the assumptions invalid. People are short, medium height, tall, thin, muscular, fat, obese, and combinations of those. You have short and fat, short and thin, tall and fat, tall and thin, muscular and short, etc. for body types.
During one year in college working on a degree, there was a professor that was sure she could come up with a formula that would predict the body shape and what sport the athlete would excel in. She took photographs of incoming freshman women and graded them as ectomorph (skinny), mesomorph (muscular), and endomorph (fat). She then followed their careers for four years of competing. The result was that there were so many discrepancies in the various sports that no conclusion could be reached and the research had no outcome relating body type and success in a particular sport.
There are some factors in body shape that lend themselves to a better chance to succeed in a specific sport. David Epstein, author of ‘The Sports Gene’, wrote about studies that were done on marathon runners from the Kalenjin tribe in Africa and why this group is so successful in running the marathon. The main focus of the research was on the physical characteristics that favor running long distances fast.
