What is fitness?

Tens of thousands of people each year run a marathon for the first time. Thousands finish an IronMan. A very few win a stage of the Tour de France, or summit Mount Everest. Humans can bench press 200kg, swim the Channel, kayak the Atlantic Ocean. Every four years we celebrate astonishing victories at the Olympics and Paralympics. The list of super-human feats is long, but these achievements are from a vanishingly small number of unusually gifted human beings. They do things that 99.99999% of us can only dream of.

The stark truth is that in most developed countries fewer than 10% of people exercise enough, and more than 40% are medically obese.

Are the remaining 50% of these people somehow ‘unfit’?

Clearly not, since they are robustly alive and generally healthy. So let’s try and define our terms.

Human fitness – what most of us really want

• To be as healthy as we can be.
• To live our lives to the fullest.
• To move our bodies through space – up and down stairs, hills and valleys – with grace and effortlessness.
• To look good.
• To age well.
• To overcome whatever ailments we are bound to suffer as quickly and painlessly as possible.
• To fulfil our daily roles with confidence and ease. This may include working (and the enormous range of activities that implies), playing with our children or grandchildren, mowing the lawn, walking the dog, cleaning the bath…

Our favourite definition of fitness is purely personal: Fitness is being able to make your body do things that make you feel good.

Health versus fitness: what’s the difference?

What happens when our health fails us? Do we worry about ‘fitness’? Of course not. We only wish to get well again. The battles we face to regain our health when it is threatened make the IronMan seem like a walk in the park. A mere toothache can cripple us. We are complex, strong-but-fragile, biological machines. And like all machines, things sometimes go wrong.

For us, fitness therefore also means maximising our chance of recovering from cancer, minimising our risks from deadly or crippling diseases, learning how to use a knee made of carbon and titanium, losing a few pounds (or a hundred), walking a few miles with the dog six months after a stroke, or even maybe going to a gym a few times a week just to keep ageing at bay.

Mind and body are one when it comes to recovering from illness. It is the same for becoming fitter; the mind will get stronger as the body does, and each drives the other. It is a way of life. I grew up in Rome and subscribe fully to the ancient Roman saying, “Mens Sana In Corpore Sano” – a healthy mind in a healthy body. The two are inextricably linked.

Fitness benefits: beyond argument

Improved fitness = improved health = improved quality of life

This has been proven in thousands of scientific studies worldwide over the past 50 years or more. Whatever age, health and fitness level you find yourself at, a properly designed fitness programme, practised regularly and combined with healthy nutrition, offers a host of benefits. There are too many to list, but the best-known and systematically proven include reduced risk of: many cancers, cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, arteriosclerosis, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, obesity and related illnesses, dementia, injuries (sprains, etc) and reduced frequency and severity from falls, twists or other strains.

The list goes on. But let’s think about it in terms of three simple benefits:

• Feel better
• Look better
• Live longer

How old is too old to start getting fit?

For most of us when we imagine a ‘fit’ person we see someone slim, with good muscle tone, usually young, dynamic, healthy-looking. We imagine runners, athletes, sportspeople of all kinds.

Can ordinary people aspire to being fit? Or even very fit? Can we still be fit at 40 or 50? How about at 60 or 70? Or into our 80s?

Of course! Research shows that at ANY age and starting from ANY level, significant health benefits accrue from improved fitness.

It’s never too late to start.

At the Fitness Factory we train people from 16 to 80+, from total beginners to elite athletes, systematically and scientifically, safely and progressively, with measurable and visible improvements.

No matter how old or de-conditioned a newcomer may be, the Fitness Factory offers a safe and effective, appropriately challenging environment for everybody to improve their health profile, fitness baseline and peak performance.

Fitness is about quality of life! We can’t all summit Everest or win a stage of the Tour De France. But one in three of us will get cancer and all of us are ageing by the second. How we cope with these inevitabilities, and the quality of our lives during and after these situations, is immensely enhanced by having a good level of fitness.

The five S’s of fitness

Ultimately, I define fitness as a combination of these five things:

Speed

The ability to move the limbs and joints through their range of motion fast, against relatively lighter resistance. Speed is variable by age and also ability dependent. Training to develop speed uses a wide range of values, for example: cycling seated at 100+ rpm is excellent speed training for a beginner, whereas an elite-level cyclist could cycle standing at 120 rpm, or cycle seated at 140+ rpm.

Stamina

Stamina is the ability to exert a sustained cardiovascular effort (60-90% of maximum heart rate) for a given length of time. Stamina is EFFORT DEPENDENT (e.g. 1500m, 10k and marathon are all different types of running stamina). Every sport has its own range. Lifting weights, for example, challenges muscular endurance in short bursts of 16 or fewer repetitions.  

Strength

Strength is the ability to move or hold the body against gravity and/or to move or hold heavy weights or push against high levels of mechanical resistance.

Suppleness

Suppleness is the ability to extend each joint’s range of motion beyond what its governing muscles can achieve. Training involves the SLOW habituation of ligaments to extend, leading muscle spindle neurones to cease triggering antagonistic contractions.

Stability

Stability and a good level of core strength and control helps manage our vulnerable lumbar spine. Being bipedal predisposes many of us to suffer from significant or crippling ailments in the lower back. The five lumbar vertebrae support all our weight and twist and turn under stress, yet their governing and supporting muscles are most often overlooked.

Good core strength and stability is a prerequisite for all fitness endeavours. Every movement the body makes, in whatever sport, is rooted through the core. One could make a very strong case for good fitness STARTING with a strong core.

Time to test!

So, hopefully you now have a good idea of what fitness means and that it most definitely can be applied to anybody. Within the context of this Five-S framework, we can define precisely what physiological changes are measurable in the human body as it begins to exercise. This will be the subject of our next blog post: what a fitness test looks like here at the Fitness Factory and why you should be doing one at least every year. Watch this space!

~Rory