5 Components of Physical Fitness

Physical fitness is the ability to function effectively throughout your workday. It allows you to perform your Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and still have enough energy left to handle any extra stresses that may arise. Certainly, you can reach your desired level of physical fitness faster by understanding the five components of physical fitness and how they fit together.

The Five Components of Physical Fitness:

* Cardiorespiratory (CR) Endurance

– The efficiency with which the body delivers oxygen and nutrients needed for muscular activity and transports waste products from the cells.

* Muscular Strength

– The greatest amount of force a muscle or muscle group can exert in a single effort.

* Muscular Endurance

– The ability of a muscle or muscle group to perform repeated movements with a sub-maximal force for extended periods of times.

* Flexibility

– The ability to move the joints or any group of joints through an entire, normal Range Of Motion (ROM).

* Body Composition

– The percentage of body fat a person has in relation to their total body mass.

Improving the first three components of fitness listed above will have a positive impact on body composition and will result in less fat. Because excessive body fat tends to negatively affect the other fitness components. Consequently, it reduces performance, detracts from appearance, and negatively impacts your health.

Factors such as speed, agility, muscle power, eye-hand coordination, and eye-foot coordination classify as components of “motor fitness”. Therefore, these factors contribute to your athletic ability. Appropriate training can improve these skills within the limits of your potential. For example, a sensible weight loss and fitness program seeks to improve or maintain all the components of physical and motor fitness through sound, progressive, mission-specific physical training.

Principles of Exercise

Adherence to certain basic, time-honored exercise principles is important for developing an effective program. The same principles of exercise apply to everyone at all levels of physical training, from the weekend warrior to the Olympic-caliber athlete. The following are some basic principles of exercise that must be followed.

Regularity

To achieve a training effect, you must exercise regularly and often. You should exercise each of the first four fitness components at least three times a week. But infrequent exercise can do little to get you to your fitness goals. Regularity is also important in resting, sleeping, and following a sensible diet.

Progression

The intensity (how hard) and/or duration (how long) of exercise must gradually increase to improve the level of fitness.

Balance

To be effective, a program should include activities that address all the fitness components. Because overemphasizing any one of them may hurt the others.

Variety

Providing a variety of activities reduces boredom and increases motivation and progress.

Specificity

Training must gear toward specific goals. For example, people become better runners if their training emphasizes running. Although swimming is great exercise, it does not improve a 2-mile-run time as much as a running program does.

Recovery

A hard day of training for a given component of fitness should be followed by an easier training day or rest day to help permit recovery. You can alternate the muscle groups exercised every other day, especially when training for strength or muscular endurance.

Overload

The workload of each exercise session must exceed the normal demands placed on the body to trigger a training effect.