What Does Fitness Mean?
The early part of the year is the time for the new resolutions we have about many things, including our personal appearance and fitness. Summer will soon be here and we want to look our best. Perhaps we have already signed up for the gym and rather predictably not attended anywhere near as much as initially intended. We want to be fit but are not clear at all what that means or the significance of the typical fitness measures used to track progress. Our lack of knowledge impairs our ability to plan our training and reduces the chances of success. While physiotherapists understand more about these concepts than most people they are still not that knowledgeable in detail.
A major health focus in the community is the management and prevention of coronary heart disease, a very common health condition and responsible for a large annual death toll. We can all work at our risk factors and bring the various parameters closer towards safe limits. Fitness is not one thing but composed of various abilities, parts of each of which may need to be developed to reach an acceptable result. Allowing one of the components to be ignored can limit the potential fitness we might achieve.
To achieve aerobic fitness we need to choose an overall body activity and maintain the performance at a particular level for a particular time. e.g. swim for 30 minutes. The degree of difficulty needs to be such to engage a training effect so we must be able to continue the activity for long enough.
To achieve muscular fitness we need to acquire sufficient strength and endurance in our muscles to achieve the forces and duration needed.
Flexibility is the ability of our bodies to be extensible, for the balance of looseness and tightness in bodily structures to be optimal for functional activity.
Dynamic and functional activities demand considerable balance, maintaining the control over our postural stability as we perform complex motions under load.
To put all the previous aspects together, power, endurance, strength, balance and aerobic capacity we need to develop coordination, a dynamic control of movement.
Typical values for the measurements which are used to indicate fitness and health are a resting blood pressure of less than 140/90 (140 over 90). The higher figure, 140, is the systolic blood pressure, the pressure occurring in the main artery when the heart is in systole (sist-oley) which is the main pumping action. The lower figure, 90, is the diastolic blood pressure, the pressure in the main artery when the heart is in diastole (di-ast-oley), the resting phase when it is refilling before the next pumping action. If the diastolic, lower number is elevated it indicates that the arterial system is stiffer than it should be and so the pressure within it is higher.
High blood pressure has consequences which relate to heart disease, kidney function, peripheral blood supply and the likelihood of stroke. This is connected with total cholesterol levels which should be less than 5.0 mmol/l (five millimoles per litre), which indicates the risk for developing atherosclerosis and heart disease to some degree. Body mass is another indicator of our present and future health, with the Body Mass Index (BMI) a useful but not infallible indicator of our status in the health stakes. The BMI is often indicated on a big colourful poster, charting the relationship between our height and our bodyweight and dividing the results into underweight, healthy, overweight and obese.
From 20 to 24.9 are the recommended limits for a healthy body mass index and the chart allows the indication of a desirable weight for our size so we can plan a realistic bodyweight to aim for if we are overweight. There are some difficulties with the BMI in that some people, perhaps due to their structure or muscular bulk, seem to get unreasonable results for their predicted desirable weight. However, the body weight index does give a good indication of what a desired weight should be and can be used along with the desired body fat content of between 21 and 27%.
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