It seems to me that one of the biggest problems in trying to figure out how to get fit stems from the fact that most of us aren’t that knowledgeable about what exactly fitness is. Since this is a broad topic I will begin by saying that in this first post, I will not try to give you more than a summary of what I see as the key elements that make up fitness. In any event, I thought it would make sense to define fitness a bit with the goal of demystifying some of the elements so you could start to think about which of these elements are your strengths or areas where you need help improving on.

• Mobility – otherwise know as flexibility, your ability to move you joints freely through a full range of motion (we will come back to the “range of motion” definition later.
• Stability – the powerful cousin to mobility, essentially it is the ability to maintain control of your joints through a full range of motion and at different velocities.
• Balance – the most overlooked and essential part of fitness because it is necessary for everything we do. balance is simply our ability to maintain our center of gravity under control whether we are standing still or moving rapidly.
• Strength – the most misunderstood and most studied element of fitness. Our strength is simply our ability to produce & REDUCE and RESIST force. We’ll define this further later on.
• Agility – similar to coordination, agility is our ability to move in a coordinated and precise way
• Speed – easiest to define, hardest to practice and get better at.
• Power – power is the ultimate expression of athleticism, a fusion of strength and speed. It is what all of us desire to experience and it is possible to attain with the right mix of training.

These are the elements of fitness.

I have purposely left out endurance and cardio not because they are not important but, simply put, they are not elements in and of themselves so much as expressions of a combination of the elements above.

So which of these elements are things that you may already possess or have you experienced before? Knowing what you may have been good at earlier can help us in finding out what could work for you today.

I’ll be posting again soon including a glossary on some of the terms that will keep reappearing like “range of motion”.