Physical Fitness Copy
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Your physical body moves you through all stages and aspects of your life. When you’re a baby, it helps you learn to crawl and walk. When you’re a young child, you use it to run, jump, and play. As a teenager you have to learn to precisely coordinate its movements as you learn to drive a car. And into adulthood, it helps you accomplish job-related tasks and supports you as you partake in the recreational activities you enjoy.
Physical fitness is one of the key ingredients for developing and maintaining a strong, healthy, fit body that will help you perform daily tasks with ease, minimizing fatigue and risk of physical injury. As an added bonus, physical fitness also helps to improve sleep, mood, and memory, and prevent or manage diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and cognitive decline.
Exercise helps to train the body in a structured way in order to improve a specific component of physical fitness. There are many different types of exercise that can be built into specific physical training programs depending on your fitness goals, but all of them help to improve the basic components of physical fitness, such as muscle strength and endurance, cardiorespiratory endurance, and mobility.
Strong, healthy, and fit comes in all shapes and sizes, but here are a few things your body needs to be able to do for you, regardless of what your body looks like.
First, your body needs to be able to move freely without pain. Mobility, flexibility, and full range of motion are the cornerstones of a strong, healthy, and fit body. The human body is designed to move consistently throughout the day, utilizing the many and varied ranges of motion of all your joints. It can be difficult to consistently move all the joints in your body through their full range of motion each day, especially if you have a sedentary job or perform a narrow range of repetitive movements. So be sure to make stretching and other mobility exercises a part of your regular fitness routine.
Second, your body needs to have energy to keep up with the activities you’re doing on a daily basis. The physiological functioning of every cell in your body is influenced by how physically fit your body is. Building and maintaining lean muscle through exercise helps keep your body’s metabolism firing on all cylinders and keeps your body systems fully operational and functioning properly. Increased physical fitness also helps to reduce systemic inflammation, increases joint lubrication minimizing pain, improves your body’s ability to process oxygen, increases the processing efficiency of your GI tract so your body can process food effectively, and can even improve concentration and sustained focus. Maintaining a high level of physical fitness helps to ensure that your body becomes a well oiled machine that’s ready to tackle any of the challenges life throws your way.
Finally, your body needs to be able to help you effectively deal with stress. In today’s modern world, stress is around every corner and it’s not going away any time soon. All of this acute and chronic stress can lead to debilitating conditions, such as hormonal imbalances, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal discomfort and dysfunction, weight gain, impaired immune cell function, and impaired thinking and decision making. Developing and maintaining a baseline level of physical fitness helps to build stronger cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and endocrine systems, which decreases the negative impact of stress on your heart, body, and mind. This leads to major improvements in your health and wellbeing.
If you are already getting after it in the gym or engaging in another type of physical training program that is helping to improve your physical fitness and achieve the things you want in life: Great! Keep up the good work!
But if you’re not currently meeting the recommended 30 minutes minimum of daily activity to help you maintain your health and minimize your risk of disease, there’s no better time to start than today! If you’re not sure where to start, try thinking outside the box. There are many activities that can help you improve your physical fitness, you’re not just limited to traditional weight lifting or cardio machines at the gym if that’s not your thing or that seems too intimidating for where your current level of fitness is at. Find an activity you enjoy, be consistent with it, and leverage it to help you improve your physical fitness. It doesn’t matter what type of activity you choose, get out there and get moving!
Regardless of where you currently fall on this physical activity spectrum, there’s always room for improvement, so make sure you’re challenging yourself everyday to be just a little better than you were the day before because developing and maintaining your physical fitness will provide you with a solid foundation for high performance.
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Muscular strength is your ability to produce maximal force, which allows you to push, pull, and lift. Muscular strength is necessary for not only moving your own body weight through various ranges of motion, but also to safely be able to handle additional weight from objects in your environment.
To develop strength, you must add increasing levels of weight, frequency, number of repetitions, or resistance to the desired movement. This technique is called progressive overload. This puts controlled stress on muscles, which forces them to adapt and get stronger.
You can improve your muscular strength by performing exercises like bench presses, squats, and deadlifts. Start off with a weight you know you can handle and be sure to always use proper form while performing these exercises to avoid injury.
Muscular endurance is your ability to perform repeated muscular actions over a longer period of time, and increasing muscular endurance allows you to perform physical actions for longer while maintaining a high level of strength. Having high muscular endurance not only improves your ability to carry out movements associated with basic daily activities, such as walking up stairs, but it also helps you sustain high levels of physical performance in critical moments.
You can improve your muscular endurance by performing high repetitions of an exercise with lighter weight. Don’t go too light (you still want to challenge your body). Activities like stair climbing are also great for building endurance.
Muscular power is your ability to produce a high level of explosive force in a short amount of time. Muscular power is all about being able to move weight at top speed.
Muscular power plays a critical role in improving reaction time to physical or mental stimuli, and is important for improving speed, stamina, and reflexes.
You can improve your muscular power by practicing powerlifting, vertical jumps, sprinting, and boxing. Be sure to warm up before performing any of these activities to lessen the risk of injury.
Flexibility is your ability to move your joints through their full range of motion. Flexibility plays a vital role in decreasing risk of injury, and it also promotes muscular coordination, muscular balance, and muscular relaxation.
Flexibility can be increased through flexion and extension of your joints. For example, your knee joint can increase flexibility through flexion of your lower leg (pulling your heel towards your bum) and extension (straightening your leg outward in front of you).
You can increase your flexibility by doing static stretching (holding a gentle pull or stretch of your muscles for a short period of time before relaxing), active stretching (moving your joints through their full range of motion in fluid motions), and mobility exercises (such as foam rolling or using a lacrosse ball to pin-point muscle relaxation). Remember to not over-stretch at first, and to work towards slight increases in range of motion and flexibility over a period of time.
Balance is your ability to maintain your center body mass over your base support. This is important for maintaining coordination and stability while standing still and when moving.
Balance is also an important element in developing and maintaining a correctly aligned posture, equal balance between muscle groups to help correctly move your body through space and perform physical tasks, and in preventing injury.
You can increase your balance by doing things as simple as standing on one foot. Or if you’re looking for something more challenging, try incorporating activities that require you to maintain stability on an unstable surface, such as a foam mat, or movements that change the center of gravity so more muscle groups need to be recruited to maintain balance.
Aerobic endurance (which is also sometimes referred to as cardiorespiratory endurance or cardiorespiratory fitness) is the ability of your circulatory and respiratory systems to consistently supply oxygen to your muscles during sustained physical activity.
Cardiorespiratory fitness helps condition the heart and lungs, improving their ability to efficiently provide the body with the oxygen it needs to meet the physical demands of the environment. Generally, individuals with greater cardiorespiratory fitness have more stamina, less fatigue, and fewer injuries. Developing and maintaining cardiovascular fitness has also been associated with increased feelings of wellbeing and reduced risk of heart disease, lung cancer, type-2 diabetes, and stroke.
You can improve your cardiorespiratory endurance by performing any activity for a prolonged period of time at a sustainable intensity. For example, walking or running at a moderate pace for 30 minutes, rigorous house cleaning or gardening for a longer period of time, or even keeping up with your kids at the playground!
Agility is your ability to stop and change direction quickly with balance and accuracy of movement. Agility is often an overlooked aspect of fitness, but is extremely important for being able to physically handle the unknowns of needing to respond to spontaneous, unpredictable, or chaotic circumstances that require quick movements and change of direction.
Agility helps the body to maintain proper alignment and posture during movement, which significantly reduces risk of injury. For example, it helps you to quickly avoid a speeding bicycle on a walking path, nimbly catching a glass before it crashes to the floor, or avoid super awkward social situations where a swift and silent escape is your ticket to freedom.
You can increase your agility by practicing agility drills and plyometric drills that utilize equipment like agility ladders, or by engaging in controlled hopping, skipping, or other load-bearing strength training activities. Playing open-skilled sports that require you to change direction, speed, and apply many different sub-skills (such as basketball, soccer, football, tennis, dance, trail running) can also help improve your agility.
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Before starting any fitness program, consider your fitness baseline. This will help you set realistic goals and crush them as quickly as possible, without risk of injury. For example, if you’ve never been physically active, it’s probably not a good idea to register to run a marathon after only one month of participating in structured strength training and aerobic conditioning. However, if you’ve already been consistently training for six months, running a marathon might be a realistic goal for you, depending on your current level of fitness.
When considering your baseline, it’s important to remember that the capabilities of our physical bodies naturally decline as we age if you’re not actively training your body in a way that counteracts that age-related decline. What you may have been able to do in your 20s or 30s you might have a more difficult time doing in your 60s or 70s. Knowing your baseline and current capabilities helps to keep these things in mind when selecting and participating in a physical fitness program.
Warming your body up before doing any kind of exercise prepares your body and mind for the workout, as well as decreases your chances of injury. As your muscles get moving, they physically warm up and your heart pumps harder to make more oxygen available to them. This improves their elasticity, which means they can contract and relax properly, reducing your risk of injury.
A good warm up can include dynamic movements that will get your blood flowing. Walking or jogging for several minutes, or doing bodyweight movements that mimic movements you’ll be doing during your actual workout are all great warm up activities. You’ll know you’ve gotten a good warm up if you’re starting to breathe more heavily, starting to break a sweat or feeling hot, and your body feels ready to fully engage in the movements you are about to do.
It can be tempting to focus on improving isolated body parts while exercising, but unless you have specific goals for, say, massive bodybuilding biceps, you will build overall fitness better and faster by focusing on functional movements. In reality, you are rarely ever going to use one isolated body part, so incorporate more complex, natural human movements into your workouts.
Functional movements mimic daily requirement movements. For example, incorporating a squat into your workout program will improve your ability to sit down or get up from a chair. Functional movements also incorporate multiple muscle groups, improving the coordination between your muscular and nervous systems, making it easier for you to move your body in effective, efficient, pain-free ways.
Bottom line is: focus on building your physical fitness in a way that aligns with how you want to be able to move while you work and play.
If you don’t like running…then don’t run!
There are so many movement options that will help you build physical fitness, so find one that you truly enjoy doing. This will help you stick with it and stay consistent. If running isn’t your thing, try hiking, yoga, playing catch with your kiddos in the backyard, or even ping-pong! Anything that gets your blood pumping and body moving is fair game!
And you don’t have to always do the same thing. For some folks it can feel boring or tedious to do the same type of exercise over and over, so mix it up! Maybe lean into hiking and swimming in the summers, then join a club basketball league in the winter when the weather gets cold to keep things fresh.
Not only can variety keep you regularly moving, but switching it up can also be a great motivator too. For example, maybe you enjoy running, but it gets boring doing the same local routes. Why not sign up for races of different lengths, with friends, or in a destination location? These new events and milestones will give you something new and different to work towards.
Cooling your body down maximizes the benefits gained from the workout, prevents injury, and reduces next-day muscle soreness and stiffness. While a warm up prepares your body and mind for your workout, a cool down transitions your body out of physical activity and back into your regular day-to-day movement. Cooling down allows your heart rate to slowly return to normal, slowing breathing and encouraging muscle relaxation. Engaging in activity recovery while cooling down also helps to decrease delayed onset muscle soreness and can help flush out toxins.
A cool down can be as simple as 10 minutes of walking or low intensity, easy variations of the movements you just did in your workout, followed by 5 minutes of gentle stretching. You know you’ve gotten a good cool down when your heart rate has returned to its usual resting rate, you are not actively sweating or breathing heavily, and your body feels physically cooler.
Consistency builds habits, and developing healthy, sustainable physical fitness habits will strengthen your optimal performance foundation. Being consistent will get you farther, faster. Periodic or sporadic bouts of physical fitness open you up to risk of injury, such as stress fractures, tendon or ligament sprains, or muscle strains. You also risk burning yourself out if you go from little movement to full-throttle efforts. Start adding activities that will help improve your physical fitness into your daily routine to help you stay consistent.
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With all this physical fitnessing, you should also be taking your recovery very seriously. Training hard won’t do you much good unless you’re recovering appropriately. Adequate sleep, quality nutrition, and sufficient hydration all play a critical part in effective recovery. If you truly want to get the physical fitness gains you’re hoping for, you need to be disciplined in incorporating daily, deliberate recovery.
REFLECT & CONNECT...
Use the “Physical Fitness Reflect & Connect” activity in the Course Action Guide to apply these concepts to your own life. Review each question prompt below.
Of the 7 physical fitness components, which ones are you already consistent on? Which ones will you need to build into your routine more? How, when, and where?
Example: I am already consistent in muscular strength and endurance. I lift weights regularly on my own now, and I can continue to do that once out of the Academy. I do not train agility at all by myself. I can incorporate ladder drills in the gym and even make playing with my kids at the park a mini agility training session.
Are you consistent with warm-up and cool-down activities? What can you make sure to continue and what can you do to consistently incorporate both into your physical fitness routine?
Example: I am good about warming up when I’m doing some kind of cardio, like doing a slower jog the first 10 minutes of my run, but I don’t regularly warm up when lifting weights or doing other intense activities. I can easily add a set of low weight to the beginning of my weightlifting routine. I also can be more consistent with a cool-down. I can either do a relaxing walk or do dynamic stretches at the end of my workouts for 5-10 minutes.
How will you track your training progress? What markers can you watch for to ensure maintenance and progression of your physical fitness?
Example: I will track my progress on my daily planner/calendar. I will schedule monthly check-ins of working weight of my back squat, bench press, deadlift, and average mile run pace. I will make sure to do max weight tests approximately every 3 months.