Fitness: Why bother?

Good levels of fitness benefits everything from how you feel in the morning, how well you can perform sexually, to how long you’re going to live disease-free.

Since fitness only relates to how efficiently we use oxygen, a skinny person can be unfit whilst a fat person may be very fit.

Wait… why should I care about fitness if it doesn’t automatically mean being skinny?

Let’s look at what happens when you get fitter. As you slide up the fitness scale, one of the first things you’ll notice is that everything just feels easier. Hooray! 

Climbing stairs no longer puffs you out! Running to catch the bus feels like a breeze. For the same activity or sport after getting fit, you don’t need to breathe as hard nor your heart to beat as hard.

You’ll also be able to run faster, cycle harder or row further with a newer fitter body.

On the inside, you do some great things:

• Capillaries grow to deliver more blood to working muscles; 
• Heart health and strength improves; 
• Fat burning and blood sugar control get a boost.

Take a step back and you notice even better things. Large scientific studies show clearly that the fitter you are:

• The longer you live; and 
• The less likely you are to develop: 
• Cardiovascular disease 
• Diabetes 
• Kidney disease 
• Erectile dysfunction; and 
• Some mental health disorders. 
• You get lower blood pressure, reduced cholesterol, triglycerides and systemic inflammation.

So get fitter, even without losing weight and you can do more, feel better, have more energy, look better, feel more confident, last longer, reach more places, achieve more goals, live longer and enjoy life more. Why the hell wouldn’t you?

Fitness: Guess what? It has NOTHING to do with how much or little you weigh…

Fitness measures your ability to use oxygen, whilst weight management depends on calorie balance (calories in and out). In the body these are very different concepts. 

In actual fact:

• you can get fitter and actually gain weight: if you do lots of cardio & still overeat;
• you can lose weight and decrease fitness: if you stop exercising whilst dieting; 

OR

• you can happily lose weight and get fitter: with diet and exercise.

AND

• A fitter person has a much greater capacity to burn calories during exercise: like having a V12 engine compared to a 4-cylinder; BUT
• Has little advantage if they don’t use that capacity: like only driving your V12 to the shops on Sunday.
• Fitter doesn’t mean having a higher metabolism either.

A crap diet isn’t helping anybody’s weight, fit or not. You can still use fitness though to help you lose weight. Let’s put this in perspective: a very fit person may burn 1200 calories / hour running, compared to a very unfit person shuffling at 400 cal /hr.

They will feel the same sense of effort, and the fit person needs to only do one third the exercise time as the unfit person. Imagine how that could impact your weight loss goals!
 
How fitness affects your ability to burn fat
Apart from not burning as many calories during exercise, people with low levels of fitness have poor fat burning capacity, with their bodies choosing to burn more carbs instead. Boosting fitness changes the way cells work, allowing a person to burn a much higher proportion of fat both in exercise and at rest.

In my next post, We’ll explore more of the many benefits of being fit.

Fitness: You know you want it.

Did you know…

Being fat and fit is better than being skinny and unfit?

Being fit does not always equal being a buff and lean god or goddess?

So… what exactly is fitness? What does it mean, and why do we really want it?

Like staring at an everyday word on a page for too long until it stops making sense, in the next several blog posts I’m going to define the elusive concept of fitness and give you a heads up on just why it’s a gift everyone deserves, far from using it just in the search for the body beautiful.

So, what is it?

Fitness describes a characteristic of the human body. Like size, weight or height, it’s really just a scale. Where you sit on the scale comes down to one, slightly abstract, concept: “How well your body can use oxygen and fuels to produce energy.”

Fitness actually has little to do with weight management or appearance – two things we usually associate with being “fit”.

How it’s measured – a little bit of science

Like grams are to weight, fitness has a unit of measure too. Testing can let you work out your own fitness score: VO2max. This stands for “the maximum rate of oxygen (O2) Volume your body can use each minute.”

Your body needs oxygen to produce energy, by burning fuels like carbohydrates and fat (and less so, protein and alcohol).

In this day and age we don’t really ever run out of fuels so the limit to how much energy we produce is how much oxygen we can use.

It goes to say then that the fitter you are (higher VO2max) >> the more oxygen your body can use >> the more energy you can produce to move faster, go further, work harder or just feel more energetic!

On the flip side, very low fitness levels mean you can’t produce much energy at all - even simple physical tasks like climbing stairs puff you out easily.

How to measure your fitness

Fitness testing can be done at most gyms, health centres or even some GPs, with either maximal tests where you reach your hardest effort (VO2max testing) or a prediction (VO2peak) based on a few submaximal tests.

There are details of fitness tests you can do yourself too, available online – have a look at my website www.lifeactive.com.au for a few options.