Define physical fitness.

Great Debates
41

I never said there was no metric. I simply believe that to define the metric so narrowly is ridiculous.

And your assertion about gauging fitness completely begs the question: we need to arrive at some sort of understanding of what fitness is, or should be, before we can properly gauge it. Simply stating that fitness is the ability to run a six-minute mile requires some justification. And it leaves out so many possible alternatives that it seems to me a very poor measure.

How many miles at six minutes? One? Three? Ten?

And if i can’t run a mile in 6 minutes, but i can run 8 miles at 7.5 minutes a mile, am i still fit?

What if i can’t run a mile in six minutes, but i can spend 80 minutes on a rugby field, alternately sprinting, tackling, running backwards, passing the ball, etc.? Am i fit then?

Maybe i’m not much of a runner, but i can swim 1500 meters in 20 minutes. How does that fit into your scale?

42

I chose a number that school children should be able to achieve in gym class. It doesn’t represent a speed challenge, it’s a measurement of cardio fitness. There are an infinite number of such tests that could be used.

43

Why are you completely neglecting flexibility, mobility, strength and endurance?

44

Because the op is asking about physical fitness. A person can be flexible, mobile and strong as an ox and be out of shape.

45

That is almost an oxymoron. Someone who is all those things is in reasonably good condition. You can’t be a strong, flexible workhorse who goes all day at a high rate of physical activity if you are sloppy and lazy physically. Human average run times for a mile are between 8-12 minutes btw. 6 is considered bloody fast by both school measures and the military. Cardio is only one function of a spectrum of physical activity that ought to be measured to check for fitness. It certainly is one of the most important ones, but hardly the only measure of health. A person who could run a fast mile, but is underweight, physically weak, and inflexible is not in as good overall condition as someone with a slower, but good time who scores above average in all other categories. Then you have to consider that there are different types of cardio exercises one could use. High impact, like running is difficult for some people,(like myself for example, I have bad knees from a wrestling accident in high school) while biking is far more gentle on my joints and allows me to perform cardio exercises for longer at at a higher heart rate.

In a previous post I suggested seven categories of physical fitness that should be tested to make a thorough evaluation of physical health. In addition, one should also factor in age/height/weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. Setting a lone bechmark in a single category of physical activity is terribly narrow minded.

46

The number I picked was based on a 12 minute 2 mile model used by a former coach as a warm-up before practice. It was more than a jog but shy of a full run. The number represents a cardio metric and not a carving in Mt Rushmore. In practice the idea would be tailored as needed and is not really a function of this discussion.

47

The point is that it is a cardio and speed metric and a very narrow one at that. Some posting in this thread (myself among them) believe that a definition and/or measure of general fitness should be broader.

I think I have settled upon defining it as “the capacity to do prolonged muscular work of varying sorts, levels, and intensity” which can of course be narrowed into specific fitness for certain tasks. I have become convinced that a reasonable model is indeed to imagine what sort of work would have been functional, included as activities of daily living, across an evolutionarily significant timescale for our species and to use that as the default general sort of work. Of course many dimensions affect that capacity: cardiorespiratory capacity both at anaerobic and endurance levels, muscular endurance, muscular power (and not restricted to particular proscribed lifts but across a wide range of possible functional movements), flexibility, and so on. Fitness so defined would likely contribute both to good long term health outcomes and a pleasing physical form. Those can be considered as outcomes of, or consequences of fitness, but are not equal to fitness.

48

OK Dseid, I’ll be serious here. You have identified a number of ways that ‘physical fitness’ could be measured, but I don’t think that list is anywhere near complete. You haven’t included cardiac control to the extent of lowering one’s heart rate following activity, or the the more general ability to recover following physical exertion. You mostly reference activities requiring minimal coordination complexity or reaction time. In addition my irreverant references to drunken activities and death matches bring up the notion of applied fitness vs. theroetical fitness. Do you think you can come up with enough measures to be reasonably complete, and proof that those measures produce the predicted results in application?

49

Hmmm. Hard to decide if I should respond by including that as under cardiorespiratory (speed of heart rate recovery after exercise is one measure of that) or by including it under the “and so on”. You are correct that I have not included coordination and reaction time as part of physical fitness. I am hesitant to do so. They strike me as more physical traits, like long arms, than aspects of fitness. I am however open to being convinced.

As to the applied vs theoretical aspect - I am a bit struck by parallels to discussions about “intelligence”. Intelligence is of course actually something that is very task specific, but that doesn’t stop us from commonly thinking in terms of a general intelligence, by which we usually mean the level of our ability to do cognitive work (problem solving) successfully across the many areas that relevant to our function both in the modern world and likely across the kinds of problems we have faced historically as a species. Of course it actually consists of many dimensions, but succeeding overall usually entails being above average in most of them. Accepting that such a general intelligence exists in theory is easy; measuring it in the real world is fraught with difficulties and enough debate to have taken up many threads on this board.

I am not sure any single test can either fully measure general intelligence or fitness nor that we can ever precisely define what domains each entail to which degree. I’d be partial to the suggestion made upthread by Acid Lamp under his “raw endurance” dimension - a long obstacle course made up of various challenges of various levels of intensity. I’d prefer that they were somewhat unpredictable, as training for a particular event makes it more a skills test than a test of overall fitness.

That said my interest in this thread was less how to test for it, than what it is. I think to some extent having a sense in mind of what good overall fitness is can help guide what kind of exercise programs we set up for ourselves (barring a specific goal, like running a marathon). Of course taking a back seat to the first priority: an exercise program has to be something you will actually do. If we say defaulted to a position that fitness equals speed in the one mile, then interval sprints and fairly short but fast paced runs would be all we would need to include in a training program for general fitness. Holding fitness as “the capacity to do prolonged muscular work of varying sorts, levels, and intensity” suggests a different sort of program is more ideal.

50

But only if you define in shape with regard to nothing but cardiovascular fitness! That’s not the only important quality; in fact, the appropriate levels of flexibility and mobility are your best defense against injury, and there’s certainly an argument to be made that the ability to not be injured is central to fitness.

51

Medical deficiencies that prevent normal function are not really a measurement of fitness. Stamina is a measurement of activity (or a lack thereof).

52

It is relative to every person. If you weigh 300 lbs and are not a professional football player, ‘fit’ would be finding some way to get some exercise. If you are 96 years old, breathing your last could be considered ‘fit’ if attended to properly.

53

While it’s true that a 2 year old or a 70 year old isn’t expected to run fast enough to meet a generic cardio test it is easy enough to adjust for age.

54

For me? Manual laborer, no question. Because nowadays I earn most of my money through manual labor.

55

You probably won’t find a better definition of fitness than the one laid out by Crossfit. The reason being that when Glassman was in the process of putting together the information and techniques that would become Crossfit, he found—to his surprise—that none of the experts actually agreed on what fitness was. With all the advice the sports and medical community dispenses, you’d think they’d agree on what fitness is, but they don’t. There are no universal standards, measurements, or methodologies for measuring fitness.

There are individual tests prescribed for certain benchmarks, but many of them have nothing to do with fitness. For example, VO2-max is a measure of how much oxygen you consume while exercising, up to your maximum possible uptake. That’s a direct measure of performance, right? Not exactly. Your VO2-max is mostly determined by genetics, and while it can be slightly increased through training, mostly what training does is enable the rest of your body to keep up with your cardiovascular system.

It also isn’t a particularly good predictor of actual performance, especially in another sport. Lance Armstrong supposedly has one of the highest VO2-max measurements ever recorded. He has shown repeatedly that he can kick just about anyone’s ass on a bike, but the first time he tried running long distance, he dropped out of a marathon that 70 and 80 year olds have finished.

Glassman’s initial work on codifying what fitness was done about 20 years ago, and we still don’t have any kind of a consensus in the sports or medical community on how to define fitness. Glassman’s 10 points of evaluation listed in the General Physical Skills sidebar on the fourth page of that PDF represent the best rubric I’ve seen so far. I think that a well-rounded athlete would ideally have close to a round radar chart if you plotted those assessment points.

There are always going to be physical tasks that you’re naturally bad or good at, due to genetics, and some things that you’ll succeed or fail at because of your psychological makeup. Training can help you reach your genetic potential, which could be quite a bit better than you think. Every athlete has weaknesses, and addressing those deficiencies not only makes them more fit, it often helps performance in other areas; there are synergistic effects.

No one is going to be either good or bad at everything. No definition of fitness should rest on inherent traits like reaction time, or factors that do not respond readily to training, like VO2-max, as I mentioned earlier. Fitness should always be defined by factors that can change with training, otherwise you’re not measuring fitness, you’re recording individual variations in physiology.

Any definition of fitness that ignores several of those 10 assessments is, in my opinion, incomplete. There are immensely strong guys in powerlifting who get winded walking from the parking lot to the lifting platform, and who are very inflexible outside the narrow range of motion needed for their lifts. They are not fit. They are undeniably strong, but they are not fit. There are long-distance runners who don’t have enough of a vertical leap to skip steps on a staircase, and most of them have chronic injuries. They are not fit either.

Overly-narrow definitions of fitness are useless. Specific training can lead to great performance in one domain at the expense of the others, and often at the expense of some aspect of health. Even if you don’t drink the CrossFit kool-aid, I think everyone would agree that someone who performs well at multiple sports and other physical pursuits, including manual labor, is probably more fit than someone who excels at only a single sport. Marathon runners probably can’t split and stack a cord of wood. Powerlifters probably can’t go on a hike in the mountains.

56

Sleel the Crossfit article on defining fitness had in fact been one of the bits that got me thinking that this question had the potential for some debate and thinking on it some myself as I decided what my own fitness goals should be at this point in my life.

Still a correction: Armstrong started out as a swimmer, moved into triathlons, and from there into cycling only. That was not his first distance run and I doubt many of the 70 and 80 year olds were keeping the pace he was running at. I am no big fan of the man honestly, but he did complete the New York Marathon in pretty damn good time.

And what I can find states that VO2-max is not mostly genetic, albeit significantly so - 25-50% of the variance between individuals; whereas even very moderate training can increase VO2-max by 15-20%.

But that article concurs with you that it is not a great predictor of performance in any event, let alone a good stand alone definition of “fitness”.

And I am not sure, honestly not disagreeing, just not sure, if a definition of fitness should include only that which is amenable to training.

Still all said I personally agree with your conclusions that it would be a mistake to define fitness in narrow terms and that the person able to participate well in a wide variety of sorts of physical activities is in general “fit”.

57

Fair enough. I thought I remembered that he had a DNF for the one in 2006, but on checking I found that I was mistaken. I probably mis-remembered his comments about how hard it was to finish.

There’s a very large genetic component. Heritability of up to 47% is enormous in anything physical. Placing between elite athletes can be influenced by 1–2% variations in performance measures. In addition, some people do not respond to training at all, and in those that do respond the training threshold is typically found in the first year. This is why I said that it’s slightly trainable.

Where you get the bang for your buck is not in trying to increase your VO2-max, which as I said is largely pre-determined, it’s in anaerobic threshold training. Even if you have a relatively crappy VO2 limit because of genetics, the longer you can perform at a high percentage of your max, the better your results. Your anaerobic threshold is much more responsive to training than your VO2-max is.

While nitpicking the details is a side issue, it kind of demonstrates the point I was trying to make, that concentrating on any one measure of fitness isn’t good.

You could include inherent factors if you want, but like I said, it would be more of a catalog of individual physiology than a measure of fitness. You get outliers in any population, but you define a standard largely by the mean, because defining fitness by the outliers would mean that no one is fit by those standards. Besides which, no one is great at everything, so the guy with incredible reflexes may fatigue easily, and the woman who can run 50 miles may have crappy agility. If you define fitness on a multi-point scale, everyone, from an elite single-sport athlete to a former couch potato can improve their weaknesses, and therefore improve their overall fitness.

58

There actually is no good data that supports this idea that running leads to bad knees and some data that strongly suggests the opposite.

59

Runners define fitness in terms of running speed and or distance. Milers think they run the perfect distance. Marathoners scoff at milers. Sprinters think they do it right.
Lifters see it as how much you can lift or the measurement of body parts.
I play racketball and play for 3 or 4 hours at a time a total of 12 hours or more per week. Fit? Some will say no.
Aerobics fans define their exercise cardiovascular perfection. Who know?. But doing anything beats the alternative.

60

It would depend on the surface you run ON I would think.