The Five Pillars of Lifetime Fitness
Posted on Aug 04, 2009 under Lifetime Fitness | No Comment
In every health-related system, there is a basis in achieving optimal fitness, to make sure that every one who decides get into the fitness lifestyle achieves the ideal shape and health they want to attain.
Ideal fitness is perceived not only as how fast you can reach your fitness goals but also knowing your body and how much activity it can take and perform. It goes beyond the mere knowledge of just being able to do sit-ups or other exercises, but the length of your resistance for doing the fitness-related activities.
The first thing to consider is your endurance in the cardiovascular activities. This is defined as to how your heart and lungs work together so your body will have sufficient oxygen to be able to do various amounts of fitness workloads. Examples of such activities are swimming, cycling, running, and jogging. To measure your endurance in cardiovascular activities, the Cooper Run is one of the most widely used fitness equipment.
Muscular strength comes second in the list. This is the sum of what your muscles can build. Doing the push-up exercise is one of the best methods to measure this fitness component. Others would be bicep curls, bench and leg press, etc.
Third is your muscular endurance. This involves the idea of how your muscles could work continuously without exhaustion. Fitness activities that could measure this are machines for stepping and elliptical equipment. The most basic would be sit-ups.
Fourth in the fitness pillars’ list is flexibility. Flexibility is your joints’ ability to move to a certain range of motility towards another joint in your body. Stretching or performing a lunge is a classic example for this, or any other fitness activity that would make you perform an operable motion. The Sit and Reach test could also pass in measuring this fitness component.
And lastly is the composition of your body. This is your body’s amount of fat mass compares to the muscles, bones, and organs. To measure body fat, the fitness activity that passes the criterion is Underwater Weighing.
The five pillars of fitness allows you to have a knowledge on how healthy your body is and how much work it needs so that you can set an appropriate fitness goal. But be reminded that no matter how important these tests are, it can not assure you of the complete picture of what you’re envisioning for your body. Still, you must consider other factors such as balance and agility.
It’s important that as you go through these abovementioned tests, you keep a record of your scores so you’ll know where you have to improve or which aspect you are limited to. This would also serve as your fitness chart to reward yourself of your possible progress and your motivation tool when you are failing to reach some of your fitness goals.
So as you decide to go through a certain fitness program, make sure that you know the purpose behind it and solidify your reasons why you want to get actively involved.