Components of Fitness
Why Fitness?
We mean it deeply when we say “Improve Fitness, Improve Everything”. Fitness is a force multiplier in life and has the potential to improve every aspect of your life. When you feel better, you do better. If anything could be claimed as a cure-all, fitness is certainly the closest with no other contenders in sight.
What is Fitness?
We define fitness as being mentally and physically capable of performing any task. To be optimally fit, all of these areas need to be managed.
- Exercise - Movement.
- Nutrition - Food.
- Sleep - Recovery.
- Treatment - Recovery and Maintenance.
- Intellect - New knowledge.
Exercise
Exercise is movement and a body in motion stays in motion. How you move affects your body and your mood so it makes sense to practice moving better.
Nutrition
Perhaps you’ve heard expressions such as “Fitness is 20% exercise and 80% nutrition.”, “You can’t outrun your fork.”, and “Abs are made in the kitchen.” These are dramatic statements, but they hold a lot of truth. Our favorite explanation of food comes from Precision Nutrition; paraphrased, food is information that tells our body how to perform.
Note: Courses in development.
Sleep
If influencing human nature were as easy as us telling you what to do and you doing it, sleep would be the first thing we’d teach. Sleep impacts everything. Poor sleep equals poor performance in the gym and throughout your day. You’re simply not your best mentally or physically when you lack a good night’s rest. If you aren’t already, you’ll want to make it a priority to get a good night’s rest because the long-term benefits and effects go far beyond just sleeping to not be tired.
Sleep Tips
- Sleep requirements will vary, but for most, getting 7-9 hours a night should suffice.
- Alcohol affects sleep quality, you may be asleep, but your body isn’t resting.
- Try to keep a consistent sleep schedule.
- Waking up without an alarm is the most natural way. Good luck with this one.
We study sleep more than you’d think are building an entire course on it, but for now, read this article: Tips for Better Sleep
Treatment
This includes daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance on the body done by you or with a professional such as massage therapy, meditation, chiropractics, physical therapy (hopefully not needed), and so on. You can’t just beat up the body without doing regular maintenance.
Intellect
The brain is equally as important to exercise as the muscles and training the brain can be just as demanding and rewarding as training the body. We don’t produce dumb jocks so we encourage as much progress in learning as we do physical progress. There’s never an end to the learning and one of the simplest ways to gain knowledge is to read, take courses and workshops, and have mentors. If it weren’t for us exercising our intellect you’d be starting at a blank website and some boring coaches.
Hopefully we’ve peaked your interest in these areas. Courses are in the works, but as you can appreciate, each of these components covers hundreds of fields of expertise. We’ll get there little by little (Interesting…sounds like persistence plays a key role. Good thing we follow our own advice).