Attaining Physical Fitness

Good health does not mean the absence of disease—although you may settle for that—it means fitness and vigor.

The U.S. President’s Council on Physical Fitness defines physical fitness as “a measure of the body’s strength, stamina and flexibility.”

In more meaningful personal terms, it is “a reflection of your ability to work with vigor and pleasure, without undue fatigue, with energy left for enjoying hobbies and recreational activities, and for meeting unforeseen emergencies…and, because the body is not a compartment separate from the mind, it relates to how you feel mentally and physically.”

A basic element of fitness is physical activity. Whether you are fat or lean, daily exercise is vitally important to your health—it is the single crucial factor for survival.

Physical fitness, actually cardiovascular fitness, is an observable and predictable benefit of exercise training. It is a state of body efficiency enabling a person to exercise vigorously for a long time period without fatigue and to respond to sudden physical and emotional demands with an economy of heartbeats and only a modest rise in blood pressure.

The fit individual has endurance or stamina—he is able to supply more energy to his muscles for them to work harder and longer, and with less effort, than when he was not physically fit. Thus, when fit, the exercise puts less strain on his cardiovascular system. He feels better, sleeps better, and has better digestion and disposition.

In a very enlightening book, “Beyond Diet…Exercise Your Way to Fitness and Heart Health,” published by the American Heart Association and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, its foreword asserts that “…principally, invention of the elevator and the motor car have reduced the population to a sedentary lifestyle accompanied by over-indulgence in fatty foods, cigarettes and candy bars. Overweight, deconditioning (getting out of shape) and tooth decay are major but not necessarily lethal resulting health problems. Of far greater importance…is the established certainty that this lifestyle has a great deal to do with the development of atherosclerosis—the clogging up of arteries of the heart, brain and kidneys—the disease process that kills and cripples more people than all other disease entities combined.”