What is "fitness"?

[insanelupus]

I've been considering this alot over the last year. Specifically, what is fitness? Or better yet, what does it mean to be fit.

I looked up fitness in the 1828 Websters dictionary, then dictionary. com, just the first definition.

1828 Webster's
FIT'NESS, noun

1. Suitableness; adaptedness; adaptation; as the fitness of things to their use.


dictionary.com
fitness
noun

1. health

The 1828 idea of adaptation was intriguing, basically being adapted for a specific function.

But, I'm always chasing that goldilocks ideal, finally understanding as I get closer to 50, that there's a benefit to over all health and a moderation of trying to be strong, lean, fast, and durable/enduring. For me, fitness is s balance of these things to live life, at work, home, and the elk woods.

It's tempting though to lean in one direction or the other, trying to get leaner, stronger, more durable/ endurance, faster, etc., but when I do, I see other areas suffer.

How are you looking at fitness in your life?

 

[B_Reynolds_AK]

Peter Attia's new book, "Outlive", provides both an outline of what it means to have Healthspan over Lifespan and the ways to get there. In my opinion, fitness is focused and mindful effort to maintain as high a functioning body as possible for the longest possible time. It needs to be balanced and sustainable. It must include all of the areas you mentioned, but, there are seasons for each of them. You cannot bulk muscle & increase max strength while at the same time getting faster and leaner.

 

[*zap*]

get leaner, stronger, more durable/ endurance, faster, etc.

what other areas of fitness are there for you?

 

[dtrkyman]

Fitness gives me confidence, surely it does for most others as well.

Gives me relief from anger, anxiety or other annoyance as well, so it is just as much mental as physical, can make you mentally tougher as well as just happier and calmer.

If I am not active I do not sleep well.

 

[Rusty Shackelford]

In my opinion, fitness is focused and mindful effort to maintain as high a functioning body as possible for the longest possible time. It needs to be balanced and sustainable.

I like this way of looking at fitness. At different times in my life I’ve been fit for different types of things, I’ve been just strong but couldn’t walk 5 flights of stairs, I’ve been lean but couldn’t lift much more than my body weight, and I’ve been fat and lazy. Now my goals and training program are focused at being a little capable at everything. I want to be prepared, be strong enough when I need to be and I never want to be unable to run 5+ miles without it killing me. So I guess my overall goal for fitness is to be capable.

 

[Peter Clark]

I love this question! I work in the fitness industry, and have worked at all sorts of levels for the last 15 years. I trained athletes at Gonzaga University, owned a gym for 5 years before relocating with my family and now am the director of training for 12 fitness clubs.

What is fitness? I love the simpleness of the Webster definition. I also love how Peter Attia outlines fitness for life in his book as mentioned above. Fitness is lots of things, it is simple, yet complex and nuanced.

In order to be fit as hunters we need to be able to be fit to complete the task of hunting in the environment we choose to hunt. This comes down to developing the systems in our bodies - among other things this means developing: strength, strength endurance, aerobic fitness, and cardiac power. Depending on where you're at with your training, you will need to focus on different things. If you are or have been a runner in the past and have a good aerobic base, perhaps you need to work on your relative strength. If you are a big strong person, you probably need to develop your aerobic fitness. This is the complex part, there are a lot of moving pieces!

Once you know where you are, it is simple; do the things to develop the systems that you need. This will often mean you need to do things you don't like - if you're a runner, you probably are a runner because you like running, you don't like lifting, and in order to develop you need to lift. Cool, go do that!

At the end of the day, most (not all) types of exercise is better that none. But, if you know where you currently are, and know where you want to go, it is a lot easier to develop a plan to get there.

 

[fngTony]

To me it’s all things and as you said with moderation. I don’t need to bench and squat big numbers. Ideally I just want to be mountain fit, meaning that an average day hiking doesn’t bother my knees, feet etc. Or packing a hunting load doesn’t kill me but I don’t expect to carry that with the same ease as if I wasn’t hunting.

 

[J_Finch]

fitness is gaining greater efficiency in your body. Being able to do more work with less effort.

 

[Maverick1]

I've seen a couple of different definitions.....

 

[PredatoronthePrairie]

If you can't walk to the garage fridge for a beer without getting out of breath. Sadlly your not in the fit category.

 

[Poser]

It’s always an interesting discussion because there is a realm where one sacrifices one’s health for the sake of performance and that really begs an interesting question about being fit.

Extreme examples:
skinny ultra racers who lack any real world strength at all, just skinny so they have less mass to move over a distance. Is that fit?

Other end of the spectrum you might consider NFL linemen at 350 lbs or, better yet, top competitive strongmen like Eddie Hall or Brian Shaw who tip the scale at 500 lbs in competition shape at great risk to their heart and overall health. Is that fit?

Recently a gal who is apparently a promising and emerging young competitive XC cyclists came into my gym. By all appearances, she looks like shit: terrible posture, no muscle to speak of, just scrawny. She managed to dislocate her shoulder jumping rope! Is that fit? Can we even consider that person an athlete? (Kind of harps back to the endurance athlete example -your body is so weak you can dislocate your shoulder using a jump rope. Seriously?)

Generally speaking, being “fit” might mean one is capable of performing a wide variety of fitness related functions, however, many such functions require a very high degree of skill: take surfing for example. You can’t expect a random “fit” person to just be able to jump in and swim out into the waves. They may very well perform better than a non fit person, but they lack the skill to express the application of fitness. On the same token, you can’t just expect a surfer to be able to perform a Clean and Jerk, because it is also a very technical skill that also require fitness.

So then, fitness can be rather specific and, at some point, one may be required to sacrifice some amount of health in order to increase their performance. So then, human performance and fitness are not necessarily the same and, when fitness is subordinate to skill, it may become a minimal or secondary function.

So we can potentially conclude that “fitness” does not necessarily mean “healthy” and the most fit is not necessarily equal to the best performance in a respective sport (ie the best weightlifter in the world may not be the most “fit”, the best center in football may not be the most fit, the best ultra racer in the world may not be the most fit).

Knowing what fitness is not, we can probably conclude that it is a generic and inarticulate term that generally means anyone who is not sedentary, but who is not performing at a level that requires too much specialized skill that they are useless in other applications or people who are sacrificing health for the sake of performance. So, “fit” is just the general active population who look like they are fit.

 

[Hippie Steve]

Fitness is discipline. I have a goal to hunt the mountains well into my 80's so I live a lifestyle that lets me accomplish that. I won't tell you what I do to achieve it because there are too many haters on this forum but it's all discipline for what you put into your body and how much exercise you give yourself. Humans have always been hunters and gatherers and moving about. I have an adage that rings true: Read a book, walk a mile and skip a meal.

 

[Coldtrail]

Fitness is simply preparing your body and mind to complete your daily activities without pain or exhaustion. Hell, even lazy people become exhausted from...being lazy.

 

[JakeSCH]

My interpretation of physical fitness was being physically versatile....which after looking up versatile, it means able to adapt so I think the idea physically adaptable to situations is appropriate.

Climb mountains, swim, carry heavy weights, running, recovering your heart rate quickly, etc

A lot of people use it as " to equip or prepare" as well. So physical fitness can mean "physically prepared".

 

[Rusty Shackelford]

If you can't walk to the garage fridge for a beer without getting out of breath. Sadlly your not in the fit category.

If I sprint to the beer fridge it makes it ok. Basically cancels out the beer calories…right?

 

[TripleJ]

Fitness is work capacity across broad time and modal domains. The more work you can accomplish in less time, across all different modes or types of exercise, the more fit you are.

 

[*zap*]

Many people will skew the term to fit their result.

 

[Poser]

Fitness is work capacity across broad time and modal domains. The more work you can accomplish in less time, across all different modes or types of exercise, the more fit you are.

I think I’m terms of this definition, there is no accounting for skill because, again, an individual who may have a more developed skill set could potentially outperform a person with more work capacity.

For example, you could take a former D1 swimmer who has been sitting on the couch for 10 years and their skill set and technique alone would potentially allow them to purger form even the most fit, untrained swimmer.

It also fails to address the fact that “work capacity” is not really a general application, rather it is specific. Burpees make your work capacity for burpees increase but they won’t contribute much to your performance on a bike. Farmers Carries won’t contribute much to your ability to do burpees, etc.

The only way around the semantic traps with this definition is to define “work capacity” as applying to singular low skill work events because the individual who may posses significant work capacity for long distance running on flat surfaces may not posses any work capacity to perform keg tosses, clean and jerks, swimming, hand stands, plank holds, burpees, bench presses, hammer throws, or even sprints. So, that definition would seem to exclude specialized athletes altogether and we wouldn’t deny that many specialized athletes lack fitness.

 

[TripleJ]

I think I’m terms of this definition, there is no accounting for skill because, again, an individual who may have a more developed skill set could potentially outperform a person with more work capacity.

For example, you could take a former D1 swimmer who has been sitting on the couch for 10 years and their skill set and technique alone would potentially allow them to purger form even the most fit, untrained swimmer.

It also fails to address the fact that “work capacity” is not really a general application, rather it is specific. Burpees make your work capacity for burpees increase but they won’t contribute much to your performance on a bike. Farmers Carries won’t contribute much to your ability to do burpees, etc.

The only way around the semantic traps with this definition is to define “work capacity” as applying to singular low skill work events because the individual who may posses significant work capacity for long distance running on flat surfaces may not posses any work capacity to perform keg tosses, clean and jerks, swimming, hand stands, plank holds, burpees, bench presses, hammer throws, or even sprints. So, that definition would seem to exclude specialized athletes altogether and we wouldn’t deny that many specialized athletes lack fitness.

Yes, I see your point. I put 'across all types or modes' as a clarifier but I should have elaborated a bit more. In my opinion, specialists as a whole, tend to be in decent shape, but not as overall 'fit'. I think overall fitness for life involves not being a specialist. My workout buddy is a 2-time Olympian in running, but he has always been limited in his ability to do much beyond run fast. He has gotten way better over the last 2 years after diversifying his training. Now someone that is decent at running, lifting weights, carrying weights, swimming, gymnastic movements and body weight movements, according to this definition, is more fit than an Olympic runner or Olympic swimmer, who is only good at one thing. I also think it's also a rabbit hole I'm not sure I want to go down to claim that a former Olympian isn't fit. I may just be talking out of my butt. Overall, though, I am in the camp that you are more fit for life if you train in a variety of ways and modes, and not just the same exercise, such as jogging, or bench press and curls every day.

 

[Choogiak]

Fitness is work capacity across broad time and modal domains. The more work you can accomplish in less time, across all different modes or types of exercise, the more fit you are.

This is CrossFits definition of fitness and I think it's beautiful. It could be restated as "how versatile are you?". Can you run and hike and swim and bike and row? Can you do it over short and long time domains? How strong are you in how many different lifts? Can you lift heavy? And then how is your muscular endurance? How is your ability to handle your own body weight? Etc, etc. This definition if then applied to your lifespan becomes a really cool definition of health, or healthspan.. I "do" CrossFit on average 4 days a week, and then bias that with heavy pack training walks or hikes most mornings. This seems to work really well in being prepared for sheep hunting