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.