Sleel, I apologize for the nit picking over the word “most”. Your overall point is something that I do not disagree with.
Wow. Very interesting. I wonder how much the tendency for long time distance runners to have lower than average BMIs has to do with it as well.
gonzo agreed that someone who has a specific purpose in mind for their fitness will define fitness in those specific terms, and that someone who does something, anything, with some regularity, is better off than someone who does not. But the question still remains - what is “general fitness”? Or is it a cipher that is undefinable as it is different for every person even if they have no specific need that they are aware of?
No big deal. If you didn’t challenge ideas you’d never find out new stuff.
As far as what general fitness is, there is currently no generally accepted definition. That’s why I said you probably won’t find a better description than the CrossFit one, because they’re the only people who have bothered to actually try to define what fitness is. If you’ve got a particular sport you do, then your performance will be measured by your success in that sport. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re fit if you take a more well-rounded approach, but that’s about as far as most people will bother to define it.
My definition of fit is: if you can throw any kind of physical challenge at someone, they can do a decent job of getting through it, and aren’t especially hurting the next day, then they’re fit. And for me, personally, if I’m strong enough, flexible enough, and in good enough control of my body to do a press handstand, then I’m in good shape But that’s because I was a gymnast from age 10 to 14. And no, I can’t do it right now. I stall with my toes on the ground. Dammit.
Height doesn’t help distance runners. Tegla Laroupe is 4 foot 11 and she has run a 2:20 marathon. In fact most of the Kenyan superstar marathoners seem to be more on the short side than the tall side.
Is there a point to this? You could find exceptions to any generality. Spud Webb played pro basketball, there are some enormously tall soccer players, etc etc… Given a comparable level of cardiac endurance, the taller guy will out perform the shorter one since he has less work to do to get to the same goal. Is that always the case? No; but it is a fair bet to be the outcome. The point I was making is that different people will have naturally occurring different aptitudes for diverse physical activities. While I think that ANYONE can train into one field or another, their genetic limitations will always play a part. Even if I trained day and night I’d still only ever be a mediocre distance runner; just like I’d never be able to outlift the larger men. Everyone has a potential that they can reach, and it is largely genetically determined. That is why I advocate a crossfit/ multiple category definition of fitness rather than a simple cardio test. There is more to fitness than being able to run mindlessly for hours.
I’m a fitness freak and I’ve thought about this a lot. You’ve hit the nail on the head and found the essential nut of the problem. Most definitions are pretty sport or activity specific.
A marathon runner might be so weak in his upper body that he couldn’t bench press a noodle. A champion weightlifter might get out of breath walking up stairs.
The way I think about it is this: My definition of fitness is Tarzan. Tarzan is not a runner or a weightlifter, or a swimmer. Tarzan is an athlete. You never know what he’s going to do, because all avenues are open to him because he can do it all.
Fitness is simply your ability to whatever presents itself. That’s what makes an athlete versus what makes a runner, or a weightlifter, or somebody else who excels at a single rubric or skillset.
It’s hard to reach all of these things. I exercise two hours a day by walking. I have plenty of endurance and I’m pretty resilient, too (i.e., my legs don’t hurt at the end of my jaunts). But I’m as weak as you can get, at least in my upper extremeties. Also, I can’t do a pushup or a situp to save my life (well, I can, but I get wiped out easily). So overall, I’d say I’m about a B- in overall physical fitness.
Physical fitness combines the notion of optimum health with the ability to perform physical tasks at a premium level.
The first is mostly genes; the second is mostly appropriate conditioning layered on top of a good set of genes, along with lifestyle choices such as not smoking and not living on a diet of charred fat. Conditioning and lifestyle layered on top of lousy genes will not create “physical fitness” although it may ameliorate the effects of those lousy genes. (Jim Fixx is a nice example, as the fitness gurus can always plead he would have croaked even sooner had he not been a runner.)
If you have lousy genes, no amount of physical conditioning will make you physically fit. If you have good genes and avoid any sort of conditioning you might still be relatively healthy–free of disease and able to live a long life–but you will not be in condition to perform aerobic and strength tasks at a premium level.
Conditioning that promotes cardiovascular optimization at the cost of joint and skeleton wear is probably the commonest mistake I see made in the effort to become physically fit. It makes me smile when I go to marathons and see only a handful of runners in the older groups, the rest having trashed their joints and bones long ago.
Here’s a baseline metric, DSeid:
No physical complaints. No family history for any inheritable illnesses. No prior exposure to carcinogens. No current or prior history of joint injury such as high-school football or the like. Normotensive. Normal OGTT, A1c and lipid profiles. Runs 2 miles in 12 mins with recovery heart rate dropping 25 bpm in 60 seconds.
I’d insure that guy, as well as describe him as physically fit.
Scylla, I am somewhat surprised that given your ultramarathoning background that you are not more heavily biased to the endurance component. The question remains merely what is reasonable to be prepared to present itself, athletically. BTW, and as an unrelated aside, once upon a time I believe you had advised me to try more minimalist shoes (if not barefoot running) in order to unlearn my heavy heel strike, to become more mid-foot strike, and to thereby avoid knee pain as I ran longer distances (13 miles+) - it took me a while to try it but I did keep it in my mind, and I do want you to know (if I am remembering correctly that it was you) that it did work once I finally took your advice. Thank you.
CP, I am not convinced that “optimum health” defines physical fitness, so much as that optimum health for your particular deal of the genetic cards is to a large degree a result of physical fitness. Also see upthread (post 58) for a reference that disabused me of the same misconception that you hold about the effects of distance running on the joints. Elderly runners may not be competing in marathons in the same numbers as in their youth, but they still do run, and have, if anything, less risk of trashing their joints than those who are not distance runners.
Sleel, crossfit has indeed convinced me to make being able to do a press hand stand a fitness goal for myself - although I am so far only able to get to holding a handstand briefly and cannot yet do a press handstand even balanced against a wall. I also really want to be able to do a muscle up! I am unsure if I will make either of those goals but they help guide me in choosing what I do for exercise and give me a meaningful (to me) benchmark, and that is useful. My problem with crossfit is that while they present a good game about variety being key, they, in practice, have one focus - high intensity high volume exercise. I think that prolonged endurance is excessively discounted in their definition of fitness.
This has turned out to be a very interesting debate. My apologies for my early skepticism. I hope the debate continues. There seems to be a fitness spectrun that could be mapped out. Each aspect of fitness could be correlated to application and training. There doesn’t seem to be a single measure that will cover everything.
An area that should be covered is the long term results of fitness. Many professional athletes end up suffering injuried that limit their fitness later in life. Arthritic conditions are a particular area. High impact training may produce greater fitness in some areas short term, but result in long term fitness issues.
To me physical fitness is just being active. Since I am an athlete it involves weight training and cardio but for someone else physical fitness could be walking or riding a bike instead of driving somewhere. I do not think that one could define it, it is different for everyone.
I can get behind this one. I mean, I consider myself moderately active and all my stats (blood pressure, heart rate, BMI, percent body fat, etc.) are in the excellent/athletic range. But I know I couldn’t run 2 miles in 12 minutes, mainly due to life-long clumsiness. And I’ve been told that it’s not really the time that matters as far as “output” goes, but the distance you travel. A person who walks 2 miles and a person who runs 2 miles burn the same amount of calories (apparently…I’m still kind of skeptical about this). So if this is true, why should the runner be rated categorically higher than the walker?
The more general the definition (within reason, of course), the better. I know a woman in her mid-70s who’s probably “fitter” than I am because she walks, swims, does yoga, and/or pilates almost every day of the week. But she doesn’t run, and I can’t imagine her running any time soon. So basing her level of fitness on how fast and long she can run would give a faulty impression of her activity level.
There is a strong culture among runners that it must be good for pretty much everyone. Studies which select out folks who already run consistently and frequently are frequently cited with relish, as in post 58. Unfortunately such studies completely miss the point about whether or not frequent and prolonged running is actually good for the masses, or whether it’s a mechanism to improve fitness among the general population.
The reason is that, by choosing to study a subpopulation which already runs frequently–long-term marathoners, say–the population genetically unfit for the benefits of running, and which is harmed by running, is already lumped into the non-running cohort.
You take a skinny little marathoner whose genes are appropriate for running (the Kalenjin come to mind here) and study him over time. His bones and joints are very likely not to be harmed, and perhaps improved. Now get Shaquille O’Neal out there running long distances and watch his hips and knees die. Matter of fact, I predict more than a little joint discomfort for Mr ONeal in the coming years, and I point to the ranks of retired NFLers as my index population for “fitness” gone amok in later years.
The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that follows long-time marathoners and proclaims benefits as if those benefits can be extrapolated to all comers really needs to go away.
We are our genes first, and we need to approach nearly everything in light of what we should do against our own individual package of genes. There’s plenty of data that various forms of excessive activity–including over-frequent running–harms more than it helps. (Also here) And pretty much any primary care physician or orthopedist is used to looking at the 50 year-old with trashed knees and hearing his story about how much he loved football in high school.
I’m not particularly opposed to running for the right gene types. I don’t think it’s harmful if you’ve been given the right physiology. But my local orthopods are doing a fine business taking care of all four of my hobby-running neighbors and their slowly-deteriorating joints.
It’s fine to disagree with the notion that “fitness” and “optimum health” are separate concepts. Of course they are. And of course physical fitness ameliorates your genetically-based destiny. As physicians I don’t think we’d probably have much argument there. What’s not correct is the assumption that a physically “fit” person with crappy genes has as optimum health as a physically “unfit” person with great genes. Jim Fixx versus the smoking geezer still puffing on his hookah in Hunza at age 95. Good genes and luck trump the cult of physical fitness as a route to longevity, even though it’s a good idea to try and wring out what you can out of your genes. The idea that we can exercise our way into optimum health by becoming physically fit is a bit overblown in Western culture, and most studies completely confuse the consequences of exercise by not being prospective.
monstro it isn’t true, unless you very narrowly define the term “output”. Yes, a person walking 2 miles and another person running two miles will each expend about the same number of calories during the activity. But in the same time period the runner will have burnt more, the runner will continue to burn more for at least a few hours later, and the runner will have more of an effect on some physiologic correlates of fitness, such as VO2 max and anaerobic threshold. And if we apply the definition of general fitness that many seem to have endorsed in this thread, the runner is better prepared to handle a wider variety of potential physical challenges than is the walker.
A related question: Is there a difference between “fitness” and “athleticism”? Let’s use you, monstro, as our example. You are moderately fit. Imagine that you add in some higher intensity work outs as well, not getting you to two miles in twelve minutes, but able to handle sprints and able to keep up a decent jog for several miles. You get to the point that you can do 50 push ups and a dozen pull-ups or more. You are without question even more solidly “fit”. But (hypothetically) you are still a klutz. You can’t throw a basketball free throw to save your life or hit a tennis ball. Swing a bat and make contact? Forget about it. Skate? You just fall down. You are without question fit but are you athletic? And if they are not the same then what is the difference?
Your first study (1989) looks at a group of long term elite runners and compares them to non-athletes and bobsleigh athletes and indeed finds some radiographic evidence of osteoarthritis in the hips. No mention was made of symptoms, if any. The study was cited in 2006 and that study concluded that
OTOH orthopedists seeing cases of 50 year old former football players with trashed knees does not even inform us as to how risky football is; it informs us even less about the risks of long term running. And what happens or does not happen to Shaq after years of basketball also fails to inform.
Now I am not absolutely convinced that running is protective or that the issue is completely settled. But what I stated seems supported by the evidence: “Elderly runners may not be competing in marathons in the same numbers as in their youth, but they still do run, and have, if anything, less risk of trashing their joints than those who are not distance runners.” Whereas your implied claim that distance running trashes the joints of most who do it, such that few are left running distances years later,
while one that had fit my own pre-existing impressions, turns out to be an inaccurate assessment when the data is looked in aggregate.
As to
Well no debate that given a choice between good genes and good health habits I would take good genes. But yeah, we’ve got to play the cards we are dealt, and a skillful player can usually do pretty well even if their luck isn’t the best; fitness and diet we can control and are the best way to optimize our individual health outcomes given the genetic hands we are each dealt. It does not seem that we disagree about that.
On preview: Runner Pat, I like the analogy and would agree.
I suppose out of the four I’d choose basketball player or manual laborer, because they usually have pretty nice bodies.
But I’d most like to have the body of a swimmer.
Of course, when it comes to fitness I care more about looking good than anything else, which I guess is sad. I think runners would probably be the healthiest of the four.
I don’t understand the leap from Runner burns more calories during X period of time than Walker to Runner is better prepared to handle a wider variety of potential physical challenges. Being able to run 2 miles doesn’t say anything about that person’s physical strength, endurance, or resilence (the components of “fitness” that I use in my definition). As an example, I have a twin sister. She runs about 3 miles on a tread mill every other day at 5 mph. On the other hand, I walk 7 miles a day, every day, at 3.5 mph.
Who’s fitter?
I know I couldn’t run 3 miles without suffering a whole lot, probably crying and pleading for mercy most of the way through.
I also know my sister couldn’t sustain my routine without suffering as well. For instance, when we’re walking the streets together, my pace is about 1.5-2 times faster than hers. I’m betting if we competed against each other to see who could walk the farthest before fatigue set in, I would win hands-down.
So while I admire my sister’s running ability and wish I could do it, I also know I’m not less fit than she is. Our work-outs are just regimented differently.
Good question. I guess when I used the word “athletic” earlier, I was referring to the term often used for defining “top-notch health”. Although I’m generally ectomorphic in build, I have some athletic qualities–like sprinter’s calves and good muscle tone. But I’m no athlete, despite my genes. I think being an athlete requires superior gross and fine motor skills, which are totally independent of fitness and health. I think most healthy people can be physically fit with a fair amount of effort, but athletism requires having the right combination of genes+developmental environment plus years of training.
Well first off you’ve moved the goalposts some haven’t you? From comparing “a person who walks 2 miles and a person who runs 2 miles” to comparing you walking 7 miles in a 2 hour work out every day to your sister jogging for a bit more than half an hour every other day. Walking 2 miles would be something like 35-40 minutes while jogging would be 20-25. I am very confident that the one who ran 20 minutes every day would have at as good of, if not better endurance than someone who walked the same distance in 40 minutes every day. And since only a thin slice of the possible physical challenges involve endurance and more involve some level of intensity, the runner is more fit.
But sure let’s compare you and your twin. And discuss how the two of you illustrate the points that this thread has been covering.
Your sister. 20-25 minutes of modest and consistent pace jogging every other day. Period. Sure that helps her health and is a positive thing to do, but it isn’t really high intensity enough to push up her anaerobic threshold or her VO2max. Nor likely long enough or often enough to stimulate significant growth of those slow twitch fibers.
You. 2 hours of a brisk walking every day. Yup good for health outcomes as well, Also won’t do much to push up either your anaerobic threshold. Maybe a little on VO2max I’d guess. And is often enough and long enough to impact the slow twitch fibers. Of course you’re spending something like 8x as many hours a week exercising than she is, albeit at lower intensity.
Still your conclusion is exactly the point. Neither one of you are well prepared to meet a whole range of possible physical challenges. She cannot handle any significant level of endurance and you cannot handle any significant level of intensity. Both of you are working on only a single dimension of fitness. As has been pointed out earlier, the most important thing is that you each have found things to do that you enjoy enough to keep up with regularly. Each of you are having substantial beneficial impact on a variety of health outcome measures by what you are each doing, lowering your risk of diabetes, decreasing risk of depression, and so on. But in terms of meeting any goal of general physical fitness, neither of you do any better than moderately well on that metric.
I wasn’t proclaiming otherwise, only saying that simply concluding that the runner is fitter than the walker could be erroneous based on one’s personal definition of fitness. It depends on what components of fitness you value more. Some people think being able to run from the charging mountain lion (or towards the sprinting water buffalo) is objectively more valuable, and evolutionarily speaking, I’m sure that this component of fitness has shaped our species tremenduously. However, others like myself value endurance…the type you’d need if you had to walk miles and miles while you gather the best nuts and berries, with the baby strapped to your back and a jug of water balanced on your head.
You said that the runner would have the best potential to face a variety of physical challenges (all things being equal). I just don’t see why this is necessarily the case. Could you explain your reasoning?
Well I was responding not generically to the value of endurance vs sprinting but to the specific case presented of the variety of tasks that someone who daily walks or runs the same distance is prepared for. In that specific case I doubt the walker is especially better prepared for endurance; both are probably as likely to handle to physical demand of walking miles and miles gathering nuts and berries as well or as poorly. Yet the runner could react to a sudden need for speed much better. Or to put in modern times: if the bus was pulling out from the corner just as they were getting there, the runner might catch up to it and make the bus; but if they both missed the bus and needed to hoof it three miles, either could handle that just as well.
The more general question has of course been part of what I was asking in the op. What does general fitness mean and what aspects of it do you value more and why?
But that’s because I was a gymnast from age 10 to 14. And no, I can’t do it right now. I stall with my toes on the ground. Dammit.