What is fitness?

Traditionally, fitness is almost exclusively a physical effort. If you were to ask 100 people what fitness is to them, you would typically hear things like strength, endurance, flexibility, and body composition (the ever-elusive six-pack). The reality is that physical fitness is but one component of a healthy, vibrant lifestyle that also includes environmental fitness, mental fitness, and emotional fitness.  Without the proper integration of these elements, fitness will have limited usefulness when faced with the inevitably bigger challenges of life. To optimize all these elements, consider the following:

Physical fitness

Beyond simply strength, endurance, and flexibility, optimizing physical fitness must include overall function from the cellular level up to the entire physical body. If one part malfunctions, eventually the entire system may fail. This starts with good nutrition as the single biggest factor that influences our health, followed closely by physical activity that “tunes” the body to perform the way we want it to and resist breakdown.

Environmental fitness

The environmental contribution, while only partly under our control, is critical as exposure to toxic environments both chemically and socially can negatively affect our health. This starts with simple actions such as reducing our impact on the external environment (recycling, etc.) but also includes choosing a workplace that is healthy due to the amount of time we spend there.

Mental fitness

Our ability to analyze a situation and make the best decision, be it for ourselves or others, is crucial to our interdependence on our peers and others around us. We have the capacity to learn throughout our lives, but can only do so if we remain open to the value in challenging our understanding of the world.

Emotional fitness

Emotional awareness and control is the most important factor that will lead us to both to overall wellness as well as happiness, which is the emotion that drives all action. One’s ability to see things as they are, no worse and no better, allows us to ride the waves of life regardless of how turbulent the waters. Understanding that we attach the meaning to the experiences of life (for better or worse) empowers us to make better choices and assign a more positive meaning to even the most challenging events we might face.

However you define fitness for yourself, it is inevitable that you will encounter a need for the other elements of wellness at some point. You can try and deny the need for them, but eventually life will deliver something to you that requires a level of strength that goes far beyond how much you can squat.