Many people, at some stage of their lives, say, “I need to get fit”, then they lace up their training shoes and hit the streets for a 30 minute jog. Some may join a gym or health club and pound the treadmill and exercise bikes before a little play around with the resistance machines.
But what do people actually mean when they say, “I need to get fit”? How much thought is given to an actual definition of ‘fitness’, and how much is a person’s interpretation of the term ’fitness’ a determining factor when deciding what types of exercise routines to follow?
I would guess that most people don’t define ‘fitness’ at all – in fact I would go as far as saying that most people don’t really know what they mean when they mention this word. If this is the case then many exercise routines that people follow could well be wrong. Therefore, I think a general definition of the word ‘fitness’ is needed. When I say general, I mean a definition that proves useful within the context of our general every-day lives (not within the context of a specialist sport – e.g. an elite marathon runner requires a certain type of fitness that enables him or her to run 26.2 miles very quickly. But how many of us require this type of fitness in our everyday lives, and what physical compromises does a marathon runner have to make to condition his body to run long distances very fast?).
Therefore, for people who don’t participate in a particular sport at a relatively serious level (or those who are not training for a particular event), what is the thing they are training for? I would suggest the thing they are training for is life. So we need to think about the activities of life that we all carry out to a certain extent. If we exercise in a way that improves our ability to carry out these activities, then surely we are becoming ‘fit for life’ – this idea should underpin our general definition of fitness.
So what are the general activities of life? What do we spend most of our time doing? This will be slightly different for people at different stages of their lives – for example, I have two young children, so I spend a lot of time lifting and carrying my kids, getting down on the floor to play with them and getting up off the floor again, running up and down the stairs, playing in the garden and park, kicking a ball around, etc. If we strip my activities back to a basic level, I spend my time lifting weight, carrying weight, getting down, getting up, ascending and descending stairs, stopping and starting, changing direction, short bursts of quick running, jumping, stretching, bending, etc. I would argue that although the actual activities we engage in may differ depending on our age and circumstances (e.g. when I’m 50 I don’t expect to be on the floor changing nappies), the basic movements I described above are relevant to most of us (e.g. when I’m 50 I expect I will still have to lift and carry things, I will still have to get down and get up again, still stop and start, etc). So if these are the general activities of life, what type of fitness would serve us best with regards to improving our ability to perform the activities? If we take it to the extreme of an elite athlete, do you think the type of training and fitness of a marathon runner will improve our ability in the activities of life better than the type of training and fitness of a decathlete? My answer would be the decathlete.
CrossFit explains this better than I can – they wrote an article in 2002 defining their idea of ‘fitness’. They use 3 ’standards’ to help define fitness, which are:
1) You are as fit as you are competent in 10 general physical skills, which are Cardiovascular / Respiratory Endurance, Stamina, Strength, Flexibility, Power, Speed, Co-ordination, Agility, Balance, and Accuracy.
2) You are as fit as your ability to perform well at all tasks, even unfamiliar tasks.
3) (this is the technical one) Total fitness requires competency and training in each of the 3 metabolic pathways. The 3 pathways are the phosphagen pathway, the glycolytic pathway, and the oxidative pathway. Each pathway powers different types of activities with the phosphagen dominating high-power activities lasting less than approx 10 seconds, the glycolytic dominating moderate-power activities lasting up to several minutes, and the oxidative dominating low-power activities lasting longer than several minutes. Crossfit argue that a frequent fault of many peoples’ fitness routines is that they favour one (maybe two) of these pathways and exclude the other(s), and they also argue that another common fault is excessive training in the oxidative pathway (if you think about the activities of life I identified earlier, many of them require relatively short bursts of effort – e.g. running up stairs).
Crossfit also argue that fitness should provide a good level of protection against disease and the effects of time, and therefore a fitness regime should promote good health and wellbeing. Diet, as well as exercise, is an important factor here.
Crossfit paint a simple picture to explain their idea of fitness in the following way: “Develop the capacity of a novice 800 meter track athlete, a gymnast, and a weightlifter and you’ll be fitter than any world-class runner, gymnast, or weightlifter.”
You can access Crossfit’s article here.
So Crossfit prescribe a rounded and general fitness regime, and although many ‘crossfitters’ train intensely to become elite general athletes, their system and ethos can be scaled and adapted according our individual aims and needs. As they say: “The needs of an olympic athlete and our grandparents differ by degree not kind. One is looking for functional dominance and the other for functional competence. Competence and dominance manifest through identical physiological mechanisms”. So, if you imagine all the different types of training a decathlete has to undertake – sprinting, weight lifting, jumping, throwing, etc, this is the type of training that will give us the functional competence for the activities of life – the difference being that most of us won’t need to train within these disciplines as intensely as the decathlete.
So now think back to the person who joins the local gym to ‘get fit’ and each time she goes to the gym she does 30 minutes running on the treadmill followed by 45 minutes pushing and pulling the resistance machines. Is this the best use of her 1 hour & 15 minutes in the gym? Forgetting the fact that regularly doing the same routine will eventually lead to boredom (at which point people start to find they are too ‘busy’ to exercise any more) and could also lead to a fitness plateau as the body adjusts to the routine, are the actual exercises consistent with getting ‘fit for life’? I would argue they are not. I accept that this person will be in better physical condition than if she didn’t do any exercise at all (and that is a good thing), but how often will her life require her to run for 30 minutes (except when she’s in the gym), and how often will life demand that she is able to lift, push or pull a weight using only an isolated muscle (or muscle group)? It is more likely that life will throw up circumstances where she is required to move quickly for less than a minute (maybe just a few seconds), suddenly change direction, lift a weight using all the major muscle groups at the same time, carry a weight over a short distance, etc. Also, the unpredictability of life means that we are often called upon to react – this could involve catching, jumping, fending, balancing, etc, – these movements are not significantly improved by steady pounding on a treadmill. Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly a place for longer cardio-type exercises within our exercise regimes (I like nothing better than getting on my bike and peddling for a couple of hours on a bright, crisp morning) but for many of us the bulk of our training should involve exercises which are more consistent with the demands of everyday life.
I like this article by Cerin Rees about Keystone Abilities; the message here – “Work out about half a dozen Keystone Abilities for you and your sport and make them the basis of your training. Put your effort into doing a few of these moves and see almost everything else fall into place” – is similar to my message of defining fitness and training accordingly.
So how do we get ‘fit for life’? The short answer is to employ the services of a good personal trainer.
The long answer is given to us by CrossFit in their explanation of ‘world-class fitness in 100 words’:
■ Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.
■ Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast.
■ Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense.
■ Regularly learn and play new sports.
Now I hear you saying, “blimey, I’ve got to do all that to be fit for life?”. Remember, CrossFit are explaining how to attain world-class fitness, but their methods are scalable. For example, I would argue that 15 minutes spent doing bodyweight squats and dumbell cleans will serve most people better for the demands of life than 45 minutes on individual resistance machines – plus, you’d have 30 minutes left to attend to other areas (e.g. doing jumps, mastering a perfect press-up, sprinting, improving balance, improving flexibility, strengthening the core, etc).
Remember – be creative and avoid routine.
No comments:
Post a Comment