Pillars of fitness

4 comments May 28th, 2008

There are four basic areas — pillars of the building, if you will — of fitness. They are:

Cardiovascular endurance — the ability of your respiratory and circulatory systems to efficiently use oxygen to sustain activities such as running, biking, walking and swimming that involve large muscle groups.

Strength training — the ability of your muscles, tendons, ligaments and other fascia to adapt to stresses of lifting weights or body-weight exercises.

Flexibilty — stretching of the muscles and other fascia to keep them limber for the stresses of exercise.

Nutrition — eating a balanced diet that optimally sustains health and activity levels and doesn’t ingest too many or too few calories.

You can make progress by taking care of two or three pillars, but it doesn’t really all fall together until you take care of all four.

The first three are usually the easy ones, it’s the nutrition part — watching calorie intake, being mindful of portion control, eating the right number of servings of each kind of food and knowing what a “serving” actually is that gets tough.

Mind your nutrition and you may become a pillar of fitness.