For example could you explain health. activity & fitness? do you know the health risks of an inactive lifestyle? Do you know the risk of poor diet? and can you name the components of fitness?
If you had have of asked me this question before I would have said, a little, yes, yes and no. I mean we all know these things to an extent, but most of us ignore what we see on TV or read in magazines as they can be boring and drone on and on. Where as I hope not to bore you but to help you. By using what I'm learning and what I have experienced hopefully you will get the know how you need to change you life.
Activity, Health & Fitness: The definitions.
- Physical activity: Any bodily movement produced by the skeletal muscles that results in energy expenditure. Examples of physical activity are, walking the shops, playing sport, house work, walking the dog or weight lifting.
- Physical fitness: A set of physical attributes that are health or skill related. The ability of the body to do what's required of it. The five components of health related fitness (which will be discussed later)
- Exercise: Physical activity that is planned, structured & repetitive. Is done to improve or maintain physical fitness. Examples of this are, swimming, aerobics classes, running, yoga, weight lifting etc.
- Health: Now health can be distinguished in two ways. 1) plain and simply being the absence of disease or sickness, if nothing is wrong a person is considered healthy. 2) taking care of your body.
Physical activity, Health & Nutrition: Why we do it & the benefits.
The most common use of physical activity & exercise is to loose and/or gain weight. However it is also good to help reduce the risk of a lot of disease's & health conditions such as;
- Anxiety
- Blood cholesterol
- Cardiovascular disease
- Cancer (Colon, Breast, Uterine, Prostate etc)
- Diabetes
- High blood pressure
- Lower back pain
- Osteoporosis
- Obesity/over weight.
That's just to list a few of the benefits to physical activity & exercise, they also help with;
- Quitting smoking (speaking from experience again here, I tried the nicotine patches, the chewing gum and nothing worked until I tried to get fit)
- Improves life expectancy
- Quality of life in the elderly
- Keeps children healthy (also sets an example to children to keep fit in the future)
- Improves sleep
- Improves quality of life in people suffering from many diseases (such as arthritis, asthma & HIV)
With all this in mind, isn't this enough reason to want to get fit & healthy? surely our vanity cant be the only reason to motivate us into getting fit? I find listing the benefits alone are sometimes not as effective. so if look at it this way. If all the above are benefits of a 'active' lifestyle think of all the health risks to a 'in-active lifestyle' aka sedentary lifestyle & poor diet. Diets high is alcohol, caffeine and low in fruit & veg carry a number of risks such as;
- Cataracts
- Colon Cancer
- Diabetes
- High blood pressure
- Heart Disease
- Lung Cancer
- Liver Disease
- Mouth & Esophageal Cancer
- Osteoporosis
- Stress
- Stomach Cancer
And that's just a few. But don't get me wrong I'm not saying that I'm perfect and don't eat this and don't drink that, everything is OK in moderation. A good diet will inverably give you more energy, keep your mood up (so your not as stressed/depressed/moody as you are with high levels of caffeine as my mum said I was) and a good diet will also keep you at a healthy body weight.
Now before you get fed up, or I start to drown on and become boring, I'm just going to discuss one more thing in this particular post. At the start of this post I asked you if you new what the components of health related fitness where. Well when I first started out I didn't, I was completely clueless, but now I know, its simple, and turns out I knew it all along, and I bet you do too. There are five components of health related fitness, they are;
- Body composition: The balance of fat, muscle, bone & other tissues in the body aka BMI.
- Cardiorespiratory fitness: The ability of the heart, blood vessels, respiratory system & muscles to work together to use oxygen to fuel the body during sustained exercise.
- Flexibility: The range of motion around a joint.
- Muscle Endurance: The ability of a muscle to sustain or repeatedly exert a force.
- Muscle strength: The force a muscle can produce
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