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.
Coronary heart disease is one of the most important mortality factors in society today, so the prevention and management of heart disease is a health priority. Risk factors for heart disease are well known so there is ample guidance as to how we can reduce our risks and brings the various measures closer to safe levels. Fitness is a complex of abilities which needs be individually worked on to achieve a useful functional balance. Leaving out one of the aspects of fitness can expose us to weaknesses and injury apart from not hitting our goals.
To achieve aerobic fitness we need to choose an overall body activity and maintain the performance at a particular level for a particular time. e.g. swim for 30 minutes. The degree of difficulty needs to be such to engage a training effect so we must be able to continue the activity for long enough.
For our muscles to be fit we need to develop enough strength, power and endurance in them to perform the required movements for the required time.
Flexibility of our body tissues involves all our joint and muscular structures having enough extensibility to safely perform the planned activities.
As we exert significant forces and move a high speeds we need to train our balance to allow us a stable base from which to exert this precise control.
To put all the previous aspects together, power, endurance, strength, balance and aerobic capacity we need to develop coordination, a dynamic control of movement.
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.
High blood pressure has consequences which relate to heart disease, kidney function, peripheral blood supply and the likelihood of stroke. This is connected with total cholesterol levels which should be less than 5.0 mmol/l (five millimoles per litre), which indicates the risk for developing atherosclerosis and heart disease to some degree. Body mass is another indicator of our present and future health, with the Body Mass Index (BMI) a useful but not infallible indicator of our status in the health stakes. The BMI is often indicated on a big colourful poster, charting the relationship between our height and our bodyweight and dividing the results into underweight, healthy, overweight and obese.
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.
