MIAMI, FL, September 15, 2026. Athletes train in seasons. There is a pre-season, a peak, a recovery block, and nobody reads the recovery block as evidence that an athlete is finished. Sarah Haslock, who spent decades guiding young dancers, raised three athletic daughters and built a genetic test for dancers before founding the DNA-led performance brand GenAthletix, thinks that frame is the thing missing from how midlife is talked about, and that its absence is costing women years.
“Perimenopause, postpartum, a stress cycle, coming back after an injury at forty-five. Those are seasons,” Haslock said. “Train them as seasons and they stop reading as decline. Right now a woman in that phase is handed one instruction, which is to work harder, and it is the instruction most likely to make her worse.”
The Advice She Is Given Was Written for Someone Else
Haslock’s argument is that the woman in question is poorly served by both halves of the market she can reach. General fitness advice treats her as a beginner. Medicine treats her as a patient. Neither answers the question she is actually asking, which is a performance question about her own body at a stage the performance industry has not written for.
“Your body is not generic. Your future shouldn’t be either. That is on the front of our website and it was never meant as a line about athletes,” she said. “Many of the women we work with do not identify as athletes at all. They are running a household, a company or a hospital rotation, sometimes all three, and nobody calls that performance. The vocabulary available to her is either sports or illness, and she is neither.”
Where Her Own Industry Has Made This Worse
Haslock is publishing a position rather than a product claim because she thinks consumer genetics has damaged its ability to be believed by exactly this reader.
The criticism she points people to is a 2012 news report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by staff journalist Roger Collier, headlined “Genetic tests for athletic ability: Science or snake oil?”. Reporting on the work of Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Technology at the University of Alberta, it describes how Caulfield sorted consumer genetic tests into three groups and placed tests based on the ACTN3 gene in the third, a group the article characterizes as scientifically well founded but sold as answering a far more complex question than it can.
Caulfield’s own words on ACTN3 are quoted in the report. “It is wrong to imply that it is a test for athletic ability, a complex, socially constructed and multi-factorial concept, or that it can provide anything close to a definitive conclusion about future speed abilities.”
GenAthletix reports on ACTN3, which its own published material describes as associated with muscle power and sprinting ability.
“I want that criticism on our own page with our own marker named in it,” Haslock said. “A woman who has already been sold three things that did not work is not moved by a fourth promise. She is moved by somebody willing to tell her what the test does not do, and my industry has been very bad at that.”
What a Report Can Honestly Do for a Season
“It cannot tell you what you will achieve, and the version that claims otherwise is what got us here,” Haslock said. “What it can do is put two or three things at the top of the list instead of eleven, so you are not running experiments in the wrong order for a year. Her scarce resource is not effort. It is time and recovery, and spending either on the wrong lever is the real cost.”
GenAthletix reports on markers commonly used in athletic profiling, including ACTN3 for muscle power and sprinting ability, ACE for endurance performance and cardiovascular fitness, BDKRB2 for recovery and muscle soreness, and MTHFR for nutrient metabolism, alongside circadian markers relating to sleep and chronotype. The company frames every result as an insight to train around rather than a verdict on what someone can achieve.
The company is clear that a genetic report is not a training plan and not a diagnosis, and that clients with medical questions belong with a physician. Where a client wants the interpretation taken further, GenAthletix maintains a network of bookable consultants including a fitness professional, a nutritionist, a physical therapist, a genetic consultant and two performance and psychology specialists.
Its DNA kit range runs from The Origin Kit at $299 through The Evolve Kit at $399 and The Ascend Kit at $499 to The Sovereign Kit at $799.
About GenAthletix
GenAthletix is a DNA-led performance and longevity brand founded by Sarah Haslock. It reads sport-relevant gene variants and translates them into reports covering nutrition, training response, recovery, injury risk and circadian rhythm, across a four-kit DNA range plus peptide reports and a network of bookable consultants. It frames every result as an insight rather than a diagnosis, and works with women navigating longevity and life stages as well as with competitive athletes. Learn more at https://genathletix.com/pages/about.
Media Contact
Sarah Haslock, Founder, GenAthletix info@genathletix.com Website https://genathletix.com Press inquiries via the contact page at https://genathletix.com/pages/contact
Media Contact
Company Name: GenAthletix
Contact Person: Sarah Haslock
Email: Send Email
Phone: 305-555-0527
City: Miami
Country: United States
Website: https://genathletix.com/
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