The Meaning of Fitness
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It's the Spring and the time we all think about what we should be doing to help ourselves become fitter and more beautiful, which we have not been doing that consistently during the last year. Gym memberships rise early in the year but many allow them to lapse as they find the motivation difficult to maintain. However, what does fitness mean? Many of us are not at all clear what it actually means to be fit and what all the fitness measurements mean, an ignorance which bodes ill for our likelihood of continuing with what we plan. Even health professionals such as me are guilty of not having a clear grasp of the numbers.
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.
In aerobic fitness the body can keep up a level of performance for a significant period of time without tiring, perhaps to cycle continuously for an hour. The training effect level must be achieved for 15 to 20 minutes or improvements in capacity will not be reached.
To achieve muscular fitness we need to acquire sufficient strength and endurance in our muscles to achieve the forces and duration needed.
To achieve flexibility we need to ensure our tissues have the appropriate lengths to allow functional extensibility of our body structures.
Balance is the ability of our bodies to maintain postural control in a wide variety of static and dynamic activities, enabling us to widen our ability to function.
To use all the strength, balance and endurance we need to work on coordination which is the practice of the skills needed to master the movements necessary.
Health and fitness can be investigated by a variety of measurement techniques which indicate the status of particular body systems. Blood pressure measurements should be not more than one hundred and forty over ninety to be in the healthy range. The upper number indicates the aortic pressure during the ventricular pumping action known as systole (sist-oley) and the lower number indicates aortic pressure when the left ventricle is filling ready for the next pumping phase, i.e. during diastole (di-ast-oley). If the blood vessel walls are flexible they give under pressure, allowing that pressure to drop while stiffer vessel walls allow increased pressures throughout the system.
The consequences of high blood pressure or hypertension can lead to problems with kidney function, peripheral perfusion, and the chances of stroke and of heart disease. Cholesterol levels are also important in heart disease and are recommended to be less than five millimoles per litre, relating to the risks of developing heart disease and atherosclerosis. The relationship between our bodyweight and our height gives us a measure of healthy weight and body fat levels by a measure known as the Body Mass Index or BMI. The BMI poster indicates in coloured regions on the chart the areas of the graph which indicate the categories of obese, overweight, healthy or underweight.
Healthy BMI values are stated as between twenty and twenty-four point nine, so by examining the chart we can predict our ideal weight ranges for our height and so realistically assess what we need to do. The BMI may have some limitations as it can give what seems like unrealistically low healthy ranges in some people, perhaps related to their particular structure such as having a high muscular bulk or large bodily frame. However, it does give a general indicator of the suggested healthy weight. Body fat content, another health indicator, is recommended to be between twenty one and twenty seven percent.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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