What Is Fitness?

Benefits of Fitness
Increasing ones fitness through physical activity is good for your heart, lungs, bones, and joints.  It lowers your risk for heart attack, diabetes, high blood pressure, and some cancers.  It can also help you sleep better, handle stress better, and keep your mind sharp.

When you stay fit, you burn more calories, even when you are at rest.  Plus, being fit gives you the energy to be more physically active and exercise harder and more efficiently.  It can also help maintain a proper weight.

The more obvious benefits, and in many cases the driving force behind one’s efforts to obtain a higher level of fitness are: increased muscle mass, toned legs, buttocks, arms, stomach and healthier looking skin. Along the way, the individual receives the added value of greater strength, improved balance, higher endurance and (often) a better frame of mind.

Types of Physical Activities
Different types of activities will emphasize one area more than another. Aerobic activities help the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems, weight lifting focuses on building muscle tone and mass, yoga and Pilates helps balance, flexibility and muscular control. But each of these, and several more, help more than just the intended focus group. The body is an integrated system and improving one area almost always has beneficial consequences for others.

All those benefits, at least to a moderate degree, can be had for minimal daily effort. Moderate intensity activity for 30 minutes per day, at least five days per week, will go a long way toward optimizing fitness.

A brisk walk, taking the stairs up one or two flights, a short daily jog, jumping rope and many other simple activities can be carried out with no special equipment or training.

More intense activity, done properly, can raise that level even further. A vigorous tennis game, a few laps in the swimming pool, an hour on the treadmill or exercise bike, or any of a dozen others, can raise your fitness to a peak with only a moderate investment of time and money.

For the truly committed there are, of course, a thousand and one classes at the gym, and every conceivable kind of home fitness equipment to fit a variety of budgets. A daily routine consisting of using free weights, followed by a good jog around the park will keep all systems functioning well.

So find an activity that you enjoy, stay with it and begin living well.