Health Vs Fitness

Health & Fitness


Many people are under the impression that for exercise to be beneficial to our health it has to be strenuous exercise, in fact research has shown that exercise done in a mild to moderate form is actually more beneficial to our health.

In order to determine exactly how much exercise we actually need per week we have to be clear about what we actually want to achieve from our exercise routine, do you want to exercise for fitness or for a healthier you. This may sound confusing for often the terms are used to mean the same thing but they do have very different meanings.

Fitness

Fitness is defined in relation to something called physical work capacity, which in simple terms means how much the body can do. A scientific way of telling how fit a person is to measure how much energy they can produce using a cycle erogmeter when cycling at a specific rate or timing how far the person can run on a track in a given time.

Fitness also relates to endurance, strength, power and flexibility, professional footballers and boxers for instance have to have high levels of fitness and endurance.

Health

Health is a broader concept and to be healthy we have to be not only resilient to diseases but also our spiritual and mental wellbeing plays an important role, usually when we say a person is fit we use the term fit and healthy together but this isn’t necessarily true.

An example of this would be if someone exercised regularly say for example playing football but they suffered from a problem such as alcoholism.

It is important to be able to distinguish between healthy and fit for the amount of exercise differs between the two. You need more exercise to get fit and remain in top shape than you do to be healthy.

Fitness training

Many people need a certain level of fitness to enable them to carry out the job they do, for example a fire-fighter, or if they are chosen for a football or rugby team. In order to achieve fitness of this level and maintain it then you would have to follow a structured training regime.

Training such as this is usually carried out in a gym under the supervision of a trainer; examples of training regimes such as these are track running and weight lifting.

The key point to achieving such a high level of fitness is the intensity of the regime and you will probably do more vigorous training than if you were just working out to be healthier.

Exercising for your health

Everyone can benefit from regular mild exercise, not only do we feel better about ourselves but also exercising helps to ward off many diseases, such as heart disease and obesity.

To become healthier we don’t have to train as intensely as we would for fitness, you can gradually increase the amount of activity you do and fit it into your daily routine.

Exercising this way can consist of simple everyday activities such as walking; a lot of people can be put off starting out on the road to becoming a healthier person simply because they think they need to work out at a level of high intensity to feel any benefit but this is untrue.

Slow and steady progress is all that is needed on a regular basis and the results will begin to show on your health, you’ll find yourself sleeping better, looking better and feeling better about yourself and have peace of mind knowing you’re doing something to help fight off the onset of early diseases.