Guide to Full Range Part 2: What is Fitness?
(Editor’s Note — This is the second part in a series of posts designed to lay the foundations for training our staff (or anyone else that wants to know more about how we approach training. As mentioned in the first part, these are minimally edited, mostly ramblings, and serve only as a starting point for later distilling. Enjoy!)
What is Fitness?
Our last post spoke a lot about how we grew and shaped our mission of educating, connecting, and inspiring people toward better fitness and health. But, before we can talk about how we actually do that, a few things need to be made clear: first and foremost among them — what is fitness?
It’s hard to imagine another topic that is so prevalent in our culture, that people spend so much money on each year, and that people all agree is “important,” but that doesn’t have any clear working definition of WHAT IT IS. When you add in the related terms “health,” and “wellness,” to the mix — forget about it.
Maybe that’s the answer itself: if you can’t define something (and thus can’t measure it), then there is no limit to the amount of things that can be marketed, promoted, and sold in the name of it. Our perception of what is the “ideal,” is undoubtedly shaped by what we see in popular culture, so it’s no wonder that when asked “what is fitness?” many people respond by describing how a fit person LOOKS — not how they live, move, feel, or behave. Does this make their definition wrong? Certainly not to the millions of people who are actively trying to get themselves more shredded, or buff. But if aesthetics are all we have to go on, is the scale (or body fat analyzer), or our eyeballs the only measures of “fitness?”
Fitness and Aesthetics
Prior to maybe the 1970s or ‘80s, there was really no such thing as “fitness” in our culture, outside of two arenas: sports and the military. In both of these, the goal of training is to perform in situations of adversity, and (other than not being overweight), there is absolutely no utility in training to “look good.” And, if you were an adult, and weren’t involved in one of these professions, or something else that required physical readiness beyond normal day-to-day activities, you simply did not exercise. There were no commercial gyms, no group fitness classes, and no real culture around fitness as we know it today.
When exercise as a hobby (not for the above mentioned vocations) started to become popular, it was largely limited to two areas: “aerobics” and, of course, body building. Credit Arnold Schwarzenegger for sparking the desire for millions of young men (and probably a very small number of women) to train for bigger, more defined muscles.
And really, this is where it seemed to stay for a long time. As I grew up, playing sports like football and wrestling, and training hard within those sports, I still went to the gym and lifted weights at night with one goal — to LOOK stronger. If I also became actually stronger, then that’s great too, I supposed.
Fitness and Performance
Whether any of us want to admit it or not, the culture of fitness, and even the growing consensus around the definition of it, changed with the introduction of something called CrossFit in the late ‘90s by a former gymnastics coach named Greg Glassman. If you don’t believe me, and think that CrossFit is still a niche thing, simply look around at what every other gym is doing: Orange Theory, F45, whatever Gold’s Gym is currently up to — all of these put at their center the concept of “functional fitness.” And, whether you want to credit someone like Glassman, who, based on many public accounts doesn’t seem like the ultimate standard for character (I’ve never met him), his definition of both “fitness” and “functional movements” are now being used by millions of people the world over, and shifted the landscape of training for not only the hobbyists, but for athletes, AND the military, in varying degrees.
Glassman’s 2002 article, “What is Fitness” defines CrossFit’s take on the matter, and is well worth the read, if you haven’t already been exposed to it. To keep it simple here, Glassman equates fitness with the ability to do work (literally — force x distance) effectively across a wide variety of physical tasks. So, instead of focusing on one specific sport or task, like running, or weightlifting, the goal of fitness should be develop proficiency in essentially EVERY physical domain. The idea of the “hopper model” is introduced, and posits that if you were to have a group of people perform a wide variety of physical challenges, then the fittest among them is the one who did best on average, even if they don’t win any of the individual events.
It’s hard to overstate how this focus on physical performance has changed the way that people have come to approach exercise, or to determine who is “fit.” If fitness is important, we should have a way to measure it, and Glassman provided just that — evidence-based, numbers-driven fitness. This approach incentivizes effort, and helps people become much more aware of what their bodies can actually do. It places people on the path of the athlete, whose success is determined by how diligently they work (along with their genetic pre-disposition and talent, of course).
However, it’s the last part of Glassman’s article (and one of CrossFit’s underpinnings) with which I take issue, dubbed the “Sickness, Fitness, Wellness Continuum.”
Courtesy journal.crossfit.com
Fitness and Health
A brief aside here: With COVID-19 dominating the news (and most of our public lives) for the past year and a half, most people have probably become aware of the research showing how exercise and nutrition play a tremendous role in the outcomes associated with all diseases, to the point that I won’t really get into it here. Being sedentary, lacking physical capacity, eating foods with no nutritional value — being, by most measures, “unfit” — is not good. In this state, we are more likely to get sick, and when we are sick, we are less likely to bounce back effectively. This is not my opinion, but rather the facts; so, if it offends you, well — I’m sorry that you had to hear it from me.
BUT, I would say (and again, my opinion) that there are more aspects to fitness than what is measured by your performance, and that the people that are the “fittest” by CrossFit’s standards are in no way the furthest away from being “sick.”
Exercise is stress, and intense exercise is intense stress. We physically stress ourselves in order to create adaptations so that our body can learn how to better handle that stress in the future. The process of recovery takes place, and we come back stronger, faster, and more enduring. However, if the stress we place upon ourselves is too much, especially combined with the many other stressors that we take on in our chaotic lives, then recovery doesn’t occur as it should — we actually dig the hole a bit deeper than it already was. Add to this the competitive nature of trying to eek out an extra rep to beat the person next to you, or lose good mechanics as you push under fatigue, and the risk of sickness and injury only increase.
CrossFit espouses (and rightly so) training to improve and have balance across the 10 General Physical Skills, which are:
Endurance
Stamina
Strength
Flexibility
Power
Speed
Coordination
Agility
Balance
Accuracy
We view fitness as attaining balance as well: balance between performing better, living a better life, and sustaining both fitness and it’s pursuit for as long as possible. To that end, let’s add in a few more general skills to the list:
The ability to sleep soundly through the night, and wake up feeling good
Regular digestion
A regular menstrual cycle (for women)
Not having nagging injuries that restrict daily movement
Good mental acuity and cognitive function
Consistent flow of energy levels throughout the day
Healthy libido
Proper hormonal function
A sense of self worth that is not dependent on performance on any given day
With this in mind, we can track “fitness” and “health” on the same continuum only up to a point. If you look at the most elite athletes in the world (CrossFit’s official, trademarked motto is “Forging Elite Fitness), at their peak, competitive form, you will find that most of the things mentioned above are at least somewhat off, if not totally out of whack (same goes for those that are excessively lean, like competitive bodybuilders or figure competitors). And, for sport, this is ok — there is a trade-off that is made for short-term performance, when points and money are at stack. But, for 99.9% of us (even if we may think we are in the .01%) sacrificing our long-term well-being in the pursuit of “fitness” is due to a lack of awareness around what we really want to get out of fitness.
Fitness and…well...“Fit”-Ness
I’m not going to start a sentence with “Webster’s Dictionary defines fitness as…,” so hop on the Google machine if you want that. BUT, to think about it in a literal sense, fitness describes capability, or being suited for or “up to the task” of something. And we see utility in this. Think about someone in your life that you are confident can handle tough situations, can adapt to different challenging scenarios, and generally does so without complaining or losing their cool — odds are, this person can be described as “fit” (most likely in the physical realms that we mentioned above, but, at minimum, mentally and emotionally).
And this is where it all comes together: being “functionally fit” is the goal — but “functional” is relative to the function of the individual. Let’s say you run a small business, have a couple young kids, and design workout and nutrition plans for a variety of different people (just a random example here), then your fitness should be based around having good energy throughout the day to keep up with all of your responsibilities, good mental acuity to make the best decisions and creative output possible, the strength and capacity to do fun things (if you care about that), and the consistent long-term pursuit of resisting entropy (the natural deterioration that comes with time and aging). If you are a firefighter, or a nurse, your fitness might look different. Or maybe not. It depends.
Can you, and should you, also pursue athletic endeavors like weightlifting, gymnastics, cycling, or anything else? Absolutely — but not to the detriment of your daily, REAL-life fitness, or longevity. Just because someone can do butterfly chest-to-bar pull-ups (and thus is “fitter” than you on the CrossFit Open leaderboard), doesn’t necessarily mean that they are actually more capable in a variety of real-life situations (or that they even SHOULD be putting their shoulders through that kind of stress, FWIW).
The differences highlighted here are what shape our view of fitness here at Full Range. Because athletic performance CAN be aligned with better overall health and fitness, doesn’t mean that it always IS. Physical capacity and the development of skills is necessary, we believe, for leading a full and happy life, but these MUST align with our long-term goals and lifestyle. Otherwise, we are being misguided, and putting our energy in places that won’t give us the returns that we really want.
To sum up, in our view, Fitness is…
Physical work capacity, encompassing strength, power, endurance, and everything that falls in between (hardware), as well as balance and coordination (software)
Healthy hormonal and nervous system function, along with good energy, sleep, digestion, and mental acuity
The ability to apply all of this to real world situations, to handle stress and change, and to recover relatively quickly from bouts of high effort/stress (physical, mental, and emotional). Some may call this “mental toughness.”
If you’ve read this far, hopefully you can indulge me as I get a little more metaphorical here. We view fitness as a journey — one that never ends. And, in many ways, the continual pursuit of fitness, and the challenges and learnings that come from it, are actually more important than any endpoint of fitness itself. Fitness is about learning what you are made of, and where your limitations are, as you skirt the line of pushing up against them and pushing past them. The pursuit of fitness teaches us patience, hard work, and humility. It teaches us how to approach challenges, and to accept failures. As one of our mentors, James Fitzgerald, has often said, fitness is about “getting comfortable with the uncomfortable.” And this, in our estimation, is true, meaningful fitness.
““We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
- T.S Eliot
