Personal Training 1: concepts of fitness

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I’ve decided to put myself through the rigor of doing a personal training qualification.  And me being me, that means I’m going to write about it.  And here we go… the first chapter of the first section of my personal training qualification addresses the concepts of total fitness and physical fitness.

You can read more about my journey towards being a personal trainer at my personal training page.

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What is total fitness?

Total fitness is defined as everything that affects the overall health of a person.  This includes the mental, emotional, social and spiritual aspects of our (human) beings.  Some may scoff at the broadness of this definition but I was actually quite pleased to see all of these aspects considered.

Why is that?  Well, I’m not about to go all Paul Chek on you but I have a healthy respect for the interplay between the mind and the body.  At university, I read a little psychology and I was always impressed by the revelation that only a few decades before I started my course, it was widely mocked in scientific circles that a psychological stress could have a physiological impact.

However, it is now well-documented that stress can cause a reduction in the capability of the immune system.  Science did a complete u-turn in a matter of a few years.  And we keep learning more about this interplay between mind and body.  Conditioning Research posted a link only recently to a study that has demonstrated how stress makes you sore.  I can barely get my head around that.  Let me try and understand, someone can be rude to me at work and that could make me recover slower from my workout?  Amazing. 

We could be only on the edge of our understanding of how the mind and the body interrelate.

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So what makes up total fitness?

Well, I made up this pictogram to show you:

As you can see, physical fitness is just a small part of total fitness.  Physical fitness can be broken down into smaller subdivisions (see below).  The other components of total fitness are as follows: 

• Medical fitness is defined as simply the absence of illness, injury or medication.  I guess some powerlifters would put it as “there is no such thing as strong but injured, strong but fatigued or strong but sick.  There are only strong and weak.”
• Nutritional fitness refers to the level of nourishment enjoyed and assesses whether the nutritional needs of an individual are being met.  I would add that there is definitely a difference between nutrition and calories.  Most people seem to get too little of the former and too much of the latter.  You can be obese and malnourished.
• Emotional fitness is the ability to manage the mental pressures of life.  I like this one because I have seen people make great gains when they are mentally in the right place but make little or no gains (with a lot of effort) when they are not.
• Social fitness is the ability of the organism to fit in within its community.  We are social animals and I think we underestimate just how big a role society and community play in making us healthy.
• Spiritual fitness is the extent to which the organism lives according to its values.  If you’re a people person and you’re doing an analyst’s job then you’re probably not achieving this goal.

Criticisms: I had the following criticisms of this analysis:

• Medical fitness is only as precise as medical science at the present time.  Given our track record on observing the effects of stress on mammals, you have to think that we’re not as clever as we think we are…
• Nutritional fitness is largely in the eye of the beholder.  Nutritional fitness will mean completely different things to Loren Cordain, Weston A Price, Brian St Pierre and the UK government

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What’s physical fitness?

Hey, here’s another pictogram:

Physical fitness is analysed through a number of different qualities as shown above.  I’m guessing you don’t need me to explain them, though…

Criticisms: I had the following criticisms of this framework:

• Muscular strength and endurance are at opposing ends of a spectrum that encompasses a wide range of types of strength, power, strength-endurance, endurance-strength and endurance.  So within this framework, hypothetically, maximal strength and long-term endurance could be sound but power could be poor.  I know that’s unlikely but it’s possible.
• Cardiovascular fitness blurs the edge of muscular endurance and is strongly connected to muscle fibre type.  It’s also often developed to the detriment of speed and strength.  I’m also not convinced that cardiovascular fitness exists in isolation of the muscular system to which it is attached (but, hey, I get to learn all about that!).

Ultimately, these categories are just a framework for exploring the concept of fitness and fall a long way short of defining what it really is.

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