Medical fitness and health benefits

What Fitness is? Is it associated with how much strength you have or how you look? And what is medical fitness? Does it mean that you are fit from both inside and outside? Your medical parameters are perfect as per your age and other criteria?

Well, this is a broad topic and needs to look deep into it. Let’s understand one by one.

What Fitness is?

Fitness can be defined as the ability to carry out everyday activities without getting excessively fatigued and to still have enough energy left to deal with the emergency situation.

Fitness is about your strength, your muscular endurance, your muscular strength, your muscular power, cardiovascular endurance, balance as well as speed. It also involves your body composition.

Majorly there are 5 components of fitness:

1) Cardiovascular Endurance (Heart Health) 2) Muscular Strength (Lifting, pushing and pulling things) 3) Muscular Endurance (Doing things repeatedly without getting tired easily) 4) Flexibility (Achieving full range of motion of all body parts) 5) Ideal Body Composition (Muscle to Fat ratio)

Cardiovascular endurance

It is basically about how much exercise you can do. Technically, it is the body’s ability to take in, transport, and convert oxygen to energy during exercise. The fitness of the heart, blood vessels, and lungs to deliver energy for the maximum time an individual can sustain the aerobic effort.

Muscular strength

It is about how much weight you can lift, how much muscular strength you have. It is the maximum force your muscle can exert in a single effort.

Muscular Endurance

Is the ability to sustain or repeat muscular activity over time. Muscular endurance can be viewed as the total-body endurance where most major muscle groups in the body are required to carry out the sustained performance. In simple terms, it is the number of reps you can do of a certain exercise.

Flexibility

Flexibility describes the range of motion of muscles at the joint. Flexibility is the body’s ability to achieve the range of movement that is demanded by a particular sport or an activity.

Body Composition

How much your fat percentage vs. the amount of muscle you have in your body. As per international standards, for males – it is 17-20% and for females, it is 21-24 %.

When we have all these components put together that is what fitness is.

Other important components of fitness, which are skill related are – Agility, Balance, Coordination, Power, Reaction time, and Speed.

• Agility – put in simple terms is being able to change directions quickly. Agility combines speed with flexibility and dynamic balance, allowing the performer to change direction with maximal speed and control.
• Balance is the ability to keep our body stable. Balance is the body’s ability to effectively control the desired performance movements.
• Coordination is the ability to move accurately and smoothly. It is the ability to link a series of muscular movements as they appear to be well controlled and efficiently executed.
• Muscular power is a combination of speed and strength.
• Reaction time is the ability to respond to an external stimulus.
• Speed is how fast you can move or it could be how fast the implement you are using can move.

Medical Fitness – individualized health management

Now we have a basic understanding of Fitness, what it is, its basic components, etc. It is now important to understand what medical fitness is and why it is important in today’s scenario.

A healthy diet and a regular exercise regime definitely have positive effects on the overall well being of an individual. At the same time, it is equally important to know what your body has to say from inside. Is the lifestyle that you are following actually reducing your health risks or preventing disease?

It is more of individualized health management. There is a possibility that you look physically fit but you have an underlying disease. It will definitely be helpful if the disease is detected at an early stage and proper treatment could be done resulting in limiting the problems which it could have had if not detected at the early stage.

Medical fitness is evidence-based where body vitals are overseen by medical professionals while you are working towards your other fitness goals.

It is recommended to go for regular health check-up as prescribed by your doctor. If it is an annual check-up program or consultation with your healthcare professionals at regular intervals. It is also a good idea to have health monitoring devices like heart rate monitors, Pulse Oximeter, BP apparatus, personal weighing scale, etc at home for frequent checks of the body vitals and consulting with your healthcare professional for a specific diet plan or exercise program as per your needs.

It will work as a boon to people with pre-existing health conditions like diabetes, heart diseases, etc. It is ideal for those who have never before participated in a serious fitness program and also for those who are beginners and really don’t know much about what fitness and medical fitness is. Medical oversight with fitness training can definitely be the first step towards an active lifestyle.