Being physically fit the play’s an important role in achieving the optimal health goal. People must understand the benefits that come from prioritizing physical fitness. The tricky question here is understanding what “fitness” is, & how you can get fit. A well-rounded workout program improves health in multiple ways. It keeps your body in the perfect shape, strengthens your muscles & bones, keeps your heart & lungs strong, & helps in protecting against chronic diseases.
There are five essential elements of and benefits of physical fitness, all of them offer certain health benefits, but maintaining optimal health needs a perfect balance between all five. Before we get into that make sure you get yourself premium quality workout clothes. It helps with motivation and getting the best of your program.
Contents
Benefits of physical fitness
Longer life expectancy: A regular fitness workout program can reduce the risk of dying from any kind of heart disease, cancers, & other major causes of death.
Mood improvement: Strength-training, Aerobic activity, & other contemplative activities like yoga, help in breaking the cycles of worry & distraction, effectively.
Healthier weight: Physical activity, when performed with a balanced diet plan, helps in losing excess weight, maintaining weight loss, and helping in preventing weight gain.
Depression relief: Physical activity helps in producing antidepressant effects on the human body. Research shows that physical activity lowers and helps people in coping up with anxiety and depression.
Better Cardiovascular Health: Being physically fit boosts the HDL cholesterol & decreases the number of unhealthy triglycerides, which in turn reduces the risks of various cardiovascular diseases.
Cognitive skills retention: Optimised fitness level helps people in maintaining thinking, learning, & judgment as they age.
Management of chronic conditions: Routine physical activity helps in preventing and managing an array of health conditions & concerns, like metabolic syndrome, depression, arthritis, type 2 diabetes, & certain cancer types
Boosts Energy levels: Doing regular physical activity helps in improving the muscle tone & strength while providing a boost to the cardiovascular system and supplies more energy to your whole body.
Better sleep: Sleep quality plays a great role in regulating your health. Also, good sleep at night is essentially important for clear thinking. Doing regular physical activities promotes healthy, and quality sleep. It even helps in falling asleep faster.
Strong bones: Studies show that adequate strength training & aerobic activity slows down the process of losing bone density which typically happens as you age
Components of Physical Fitness
Cardiovascular Endurance
Cardiovascular endurance (also referred to as cardiorespiratory endurance/aerobic fitness) is the body’s ability to efficiently & effectively take in oxygen & deliver it to the body’s tissues by your heart, arteries, lungs, vessels, & veins. By performing regular exercise you challenge the heart and lungs. Together, your heart & lungs supply fuel to the body along with the oxygen that your muscles require for functioning properly.
Cardiovascular endurance not only maintains or improves efficient delivery & uptake of oxygen to the body’s systems. Cardiorespiratory endurance is primarily developed by performing aerobic training, which includes activities that elevate the heart rate & breathing like jogging, walking, or biking. Cardiovascular endurance affects the following systems.
- Enhance your cellular metabolism
- Ease physical challenges you face in everyday life
The core key to developing cardiovascular endurance is consistency. It might sound a lot, but breaking 150 minutes to 20-30 minutes of physical activity per day, five-seven days a week mainly depends upon how hard you train yourself. Strengthening the heart muscle & increasing blood volume boosts the ability to supply the body’s cells with adequate oxygen & nutrients that aids in removing carbon dioxide & metabolic wastes.
Muscular Endurance
It’s one factor that contributes to your muscular health. Muscular endurance can be assumed as a muscle group’s ability to contract continuously against the given resistance. Holding a plank or a strengthening position for a longer period is also an example of muscular endurance.
The longer you can contract the abdominals while holding the body in the steady position, the greater muscular endurance you will develop through the abdominals, hips & shoulders.
Mainly the extent you should go for developing muscular endurance is directly related to your health and fitness goals. Muscular endurance is specific to a muscle group.
- For Day-to-day activities:
For everyday health purposes, you might want to gain enough endurance that eases you into everyday activities such as simply climbing stairs or lift & carry heavier objects & groceries. Low to moderate intensity weight-bearing & strength-training activities helps in building up endurance.
- Fitness-Related Goals
If your goals are competing as a want to become an endurance athlete your focus should be on high-intensity strength repetitions & sport-specific training.
Muscle Strength
Muscular strength is developed mainly by weight and resistance training, also known as anaerobic exercise. The anaerobic workout incorporates short interval, high-intensity activities which rely on immediate energy sources & demand little or no oxygen while you are doing an activity. High-intensity training is performed for building muscular strength with short, high-intensity exercises.
Developing muscular strength & endurance is not only crucial for sports athletes & bodybuilders but important for the children, seniors, & everyone in between. Your muscular support allows you to work, play, & live efficiently. Strength training involves using resistance machines, free weights, resistance bands, & other tools.
You can also develop muscular strength by performing bodyweight training after getting in your workout clothes. If the strength training is done at least two times a week, your muscle strength & bone strength will increase. This helps in managing health conditions such as diabetes, dementia, arthritis, hypertension, & many others.
Flexibility
Flexibility is regarded as the range of motion your joint has. Same as muscular endurance & strength flexibility is also joint-specific. For example, you can have flexible shoulders, but tight & inflexible hamstrings. Flexibility plays a significant role, in doing unhindered movements & can affect balance, coordination & agility. Doing the full range of motion through the major joints help in reducing the probability of injury & enhancing athletic performance.
With age, the significance of flexibility gets more clear. Having an inflexible body affects your overall life quality & makes it more challenging to perform day-to-day tasks. Like picking up heavy items off the floor or from shelves or simply moving them. Static stretching works very well for developing flexibility in your body.
Body Composition
Your body’s composition is the fat to mass ratio and the final component of physical fitness. Abnormal levels of body composition are associated with negative outcomes like heart disease & type 2 diabetes, maintaining optimized healthy body composition should be your primary goal. To see improvements in your body composition, you must know what your starting point should be. Simply weighing yourself on the weight machine will not do the work. Your weight alone doesn’t tell anything regarding the makeup of the internal body tissues. It’s just the weight of your body.
A trainer or exclusive way should be used for measuring your body composition. You can also do it by using bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) for estimating the fat percentage in your body. To qualify as a fit individual:
- A man should have a body fat composition lesser than 17%
- A woman should have a body fat composition lesser than 24%
Body composition is also improved when you work on the rest of the factors of physical fitness.
Author Bio
This is Mike Jones, a fitness enthusiast, and martial arts lover. I have been training for martial arts since my teenage, and now I own 10 years of martial arts experience. It took me years of experience and research on how all the aspects respect to sports matter. Denying suitable sports gear is totally your loss. My goal is to share my experiences with newcomers and want them to buy some tips via my articles. Elite Sports is the platform that helps me to transfer my words via their blog posts. I hope, you enjoy reading my articles, and these might be helpful for you to carry on your training. Don’t give up because the darkest night produces the brightest stars.
If you have any questions regarding anything related, you can touch me at mike@elitesports.com.
Leave a Reply