Fitness Information

It’s vital to go over five components of fitness because a lot of us tend to overemphasize certain factors in our fitness regime. If you truly want to get, and stay, fit then it’s important to keep all of these factors in mind. Remember: the true meaning of fitness is a balance act of these 5 components. Don’t get caught with your blinders on by obsessing over weight loss , building muscle, or endurance strength ONLY.

Have you ever noticed how on weight loss reality TV shows the professional trainers never focus on just one such factor, but create fitness regimes that incorporate a group of various issues? This is extremely important. Even if your main goal is to lose weight, remember that your endurance, muscle strength and flexibility should be taken into account too or else you’ll hit a wall.

Now that I’ve explained the importance of these components, let’s take a look at what they actually are:

1. Cardiorespiratory endurance: this is how well your heart and lungs perform in providing the oxygen your body needs during cardio-intensive workouts (ex. running, swimming, biking). Remember, oxygen is the fuel your body needs to keep you going! Many fitness experts argue that this is the most imporant factor in the 5 components of fitness. To see how much cardiorespiratory endurance you have, test to see how long you can run or bike for before feeling out of breath.
2. Muscular endurance: this is a muscle’s ability to apply force, or maintain repeated contractions, to a fixed object. To test your muscular endurance, start doing some pushups! The more you can do, the better your shoulders’ and arms’ muscular endurances are.

3. Muscular strength: this is your muscle’s ability to expend force for a short amount of time. The best way to test your muscle strength, as you can probably guess, is lift some weights!

4. Flexibility: This is the ability to move your muscles and joints in a wide range of motion. Testing this is very simple, but like with muscle strength, you should check each part of your body. To see how flexible your hamstrings are, for example, see if you can touch your toes.

5. Body composition: this is the ratio of lean body mass to fat. The first is the weight of muscle, bone, internal organs and water in your body. The latter represents how much fat tissue your body has.  To check your body composition, measure your BMI )body mass index). It is not enough to weigh yourself because muscle weighs more than fat!

Most of us were taught these components in middle school (remember it or not!), back when teachers and parents were desperately trying to peel us away from Saturday morning cartoons, and outside to get some exercise. The fact that school systems were already trying to drill these components into our little heads in middle school shows just how fundamental they are!