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A guide to fitness and exercise
Fitness and exercise go hand in hand. Think of the word fitness and one of the first images that will pop into your head is likely some form of exercise! But what is fitness, and which fitness exercises can you do to improve your fitness? Before we get into specific fitness exercises and training programmes we must firstly be 100% certain that we are going to embrace this new life style, and make the life changing commitment to lead a fitter and more healthier life style. Patience is key here. Improving your fitness is a long term, challenging, but very awarding path.
The various aspects of fitness and exercise which this article covers is mainly targeted towards healthy adults that are no older than 40 years old. If you are older then 40, have lead a very prolonged and unhealthy sedentary life, or fit into any of the following categories, it would be advised to seek a medical professional before proceeding with a fitness and exercise program.
With the above covered, lets take a better look at fitness, exercise and how we can be fitter and healthier individuals.
Fitness, a word often misunderstood, or not fully understood. Fitness can be thought of as "our ability to do work and perform to our potential". We can generally split fitness into categories and look at each one individually.
Now we know the individual ingredients that come under the umbrella word "fitness", we are now in a much better position to rate ourselves against each one to see how fit we really are. We have potential in each of the above areas, but our individual circumstances will affect each one, some of which are changeable by ourselves to make way for a fitter life style, others which we do not have any control over. We must also remember that not everybody will have the same goals. Overall fitness is not always the main goal of many sport professionals and enthusiasts, due to different sporting disciplines being more demanding in a selection of the above fitness components. Lets look at an example, a power lifter. Out of the above list of overall fitness parameters, a power lifting would likely be mostly targeting towards; strength to increase his/her totals, power due to the discipline being a quick low repetition lift, flexibility, balance and agility to ensure perfect execution, and lastly body composition to keep competitive at his/her weight class. Muscle and cardiovascular endurance are aspects to fitness that a power lifter would have little interest in for improving the performance in their sport.
For the majority of us, improving our fitness will involve addressing each of the components that overall make up fitness, and improving these mainly through various forms of exercise.
To accomplish overall fitness we must address each aspect of fitness and then apply an exercise to improve our performance and ability in that particular component. If our goals are different than overall fitness then our exercise program is going to be specifically targeted towards promoting improved performance in the fitness components that will aid in reaching our goal. If our goal is improving overall fitness then we must also remember that our current abilities, fitness levels, age and preferences will all influence on how we go about improving fitness levels.
Taking each fitness component, lets look at how each can be improved with fitness exercise training.
Strength - strength can be improved by various resistance training routines. Performing a full body weight training routine, two to three times per week, can be very effective at increasing strength. Compound fitness exercises (targeting more then one muscle group, such as a dead lift) would be favoured over isolation exercises (targeting one muscle group, such as biceps curls) due to recruiting more muscles over the course of our weight training routine. An example fitness weight training routine may look like the following:
Day 1
Squats
Bench press
Barbell rows
Day 2
Dead lift
Push press
Chin ups/ Pull downs
Day 1 and 2 can be used within the week, ideally with a couple of days rest in between. If we are focusing on muscle strength then we would ideally be focusing on six to twelve repetitions during a set, with two to three working sets per exercise.
Power - this too can be improved with weight training principals. Supplementing lower repetitions ranges, particularly 1-4 repetitions, performed in an explosive (and correct) form can improve muscle power.
Speed - following on from the power component above, speed is a component that can be improved from fitness exercise principles that also target other fitness components, such as power and strength. Incorporating other exercises such as sprints, or sprints through water, can aid in speed performance. Speed is obviously a general component, and it applies to the task we are performing.
Muscular endurance - the ability of your muscles to perform after a sustained and prolonged duration of contractions, or static contraction. Muscular endurance can be improved via weight training in the higher repetition range, typically of twenty and more repetitions per set. Static holds, that is applying force against a static object, is also a test to muscle endurance and can be used to increase endurance in specific muscle groups. Many other fitness exercises will involve muscle endurance, such as swimming, running, cycling, walking, rowing, and many more.
Flexibility - your range of motion and ability to move at the joints of the body. This can be improved by regular stretching of muscle groups. We can successfully including stretching during our cool down period, which has the benefit of allowing us to stretch muscle groups that are full of blood and more acceptable to stretching.
Cardiovascular ability - our ability to sustain the necessary functions needed to perform over a sustained period of time, including oxygen delivery, and removal of waste products from the activity. Exercises performed over a long period time such as distance running, cycling and swimming can improve our cardiovascular performance.
Balance and agility - for overall fitness purposes we can say that our balance and agility will likely be improved from improving our flexibility and exercising the body as a whole unit. Yoga is also a great supplementary activity that could aid this component of fitness.
Body composition - meaning how much of your body is lean body mass, and how much is fat mass. We would ideally want to be aiming towards a state of greater lean body mass, with less body fat mass. Body composition is improved with exercise and correct nutritional intake.
As we can see above, many fitness exercises will overlap (to our benefit) allowing us to perform an exercise that will target more the one fitness component. An example of this is swimming, which can help with muscle endurance, power, speed, cardiovascular endurance, and body composition.
Incorporating weight training to aid fitness performance in strength, power, speed, and body composition, can be included two to three times per week. Fitness exercises such as swimming (and pool work), running, and cycling that aid with muscle endurance and cardiovascular endurance can be included two to three times per week, for a duration of anywhere between twenty to sixty minutes. Supplementary stretching, balance, and agility work can be included during the cool down period of our weight training sessions to good effect.
I have included a sample routine in the article above, but we also have a great resource that will help you with learning about exercises and the muscles they target, see our muscle and exercise section. I have also included links to the various sections below for your reference:
On another note, it would be wise to think about when your fitness activities would fit into your day, and how your nutritional intake would fit around this. It would be unwise eating a meal directly before exercising. There is a lot involved with incorporating a nutritional regime, and I have not included much on the subject within this article because there is so much to it. You can get specific advice on our fitness forums regarding this, this is a much more fruitful approach due to dietary intake being very person specific.
I finished my opening paragraph with this line, and I will end my ending paragraph with it too. Improving your fitness is a long term, challenging, but very awarding path.
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