I love Pope Francis’ quote about young people expressing their talents and gifts. Applied to fitness, we are all born with a certain amount of physical gifts and potential. It is through health, fitness and physical education and practice we can preserve, restore and celebrate these gifts. I have reviewed a few faith and fitness concepts in other posts, so let’s talk a bit about what exactly exercise and fitness are and how we can practice and share them.
What is exercise?
As mentioned earlier, the physical activity required for mere survival hundreds and more so, thousands of years ago is what we today label exercise. A dictionary provides two primary definitions for exercise: (1) activity requiring physical effort, carried out especially to sustain or improve health and fitness, (“we went to the gym to exercise”) and (2) the use or application of a faculty, right, or process. (“We have the right to exercise our religion.”)
To fully understand what exercise means, especially CatholicFIT exercise, we can’t have one of these definitions without the other. Therefore, exercise is: the application of a faculty and right that requires physical effort, carried out to sustain or improve (aka celebrate) our health and fitness. God gave us the faculty, He granted us the right, it requires some effort, and it celebrates our unique, personal level of fitness.
Three ways to define fitness:
- Fitness is the ability to perform a task. If a mother can pick up her child, she is “fit” to do so. Therefore fitness is relative to your goal tasks. If you want to be fit, first choose what task you would like to perform, then work towards that goal. This can be running your next charity 5K or walking the stairs of your house with more stability and balance.
- Fitness includes several attributes required to perform a particular task. Generally speaking, the more attributes involved and the more balanced they are developed, the more fit a person is by most standards. For example, a basketball player requires the fitness attributes of cardiovascular endurance for playing a ninety minute game, strength and power for sprinting and jumping, agility, accuracy and balance for bounding and shooting the ball and flexibility to squat and play defense correctly. Each underlined term here is an example of a fitness attribute.
- Fitness involves movement (or patterns of movement.) Each task we perform requires a set of movement patterns. Developing fitness attributes usually requires movement. Common movement patterns include squatting, lunging, walking and twisting.
Your goal when teaching and practicing exercise is to improve or maintain your ability to perform certain “natural movement patterns”, and then perform these movements in a way to increase the capacity of your fitness attributes. For example, to improve your strength for picking something up from the floor, (goal task), you want to work on the squatting movement. Then build strength with this movement by practicing it weekly.
When you attach a goal task, (a performance goal), you have purpose for performing the exercise. This helps build the motivation required to stick with an exercise routine. (See the post, Strength in Purpose for more on this.)
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