Physical Fitness - Fitness

Fitness

The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports — a study group sponsored by the government of the United States—declines to offer a simple definition of physical fitness. Instead, it developed the following chart:

Health related Skill related Sports
  • Metabolic
  • Morphological
  • Bone integrity
  • Other
  • Body composition
  • Cardiovascular fitness
  • Flexibility
  • Muscular endurance
  • Muscle strength
  • Agility
  • Balance
  • Coordination
  • Power
  • Speed
  • Reaction time
  • Other
  • Team sport
  • Individual sport
  • Lifetime
  • Other

A comprehensive fitness program tailored to an individual will probably focus on one or more specific skills, and on age- or health-related needs such as bone health. Many sources also cite mental, social and emotional health as an important part of overall fitness. This is often presented in textbooks as a triangle made up of three points, which represent physical, emotional, and mental fitness. Physical fitness can also prevent or treat many chronic health conditions brought on by unhealthy lifestyle or aging. Working out can also help people sleep better. To stay healthy it is important to engage in physical activity.

Read more about this topic:  Physical Fitness

Famous quotes containing the word fitness:

    Critics generally come to be critics not by reason of their fitness for this, but of their unfitness for anything else. Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were a crime, and counsel should be heard on both sides.
    Samuel Butler (1835–1902)

    ... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.
    Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)

    Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of children.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)