5 Components of Physical Fitness | Fitness Tips & Guides from Answer Fitness

5 Components of Physical Fitness | Fitness Tips & Guides

January 4, 2009 on 10:47 am | By Matt | In Fitness Tips & Guides |

What Is Physical Fitness? Understanding the Five Basic Components of Physical Fitness Can Be The Difference Between Fitness Success & Failure.

What does it mean to be “physically fit?”

Ask a dozen people to describe to you a person who typifies the concept of “physical fitness” and you will likely get 12 different answers.

Many people will probably mention Olympic athletes as paragons of physical fitness — people like swimmer and Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps or U.S. gymnast Shawn Johnson. Others might point to professional athletes like NBA forward LeBron James or legendary NFL running back Herschel Walker. Other people might say that fashion models, certain actresses or actors, bodybuilders or even professional wrestlers represent “physical fitness.”

So clearly, physical fitness is in the eye of the beholder.

Or is it?

Can You Look “In-Shape” But Not Be Physically Fit?

While excelling at some type of athletic activity — whether you are a professional or amateur — requires a certain level of physical fitness, it doesn’t guarantee that they are physically fit.

For example, there are NFL linebackers who do their job very well on the field, but are over-weight and inflexible. The same goes for people who have lots of muscle mass like bodybuilders or professional wrestlers, but who may not be able to run more than a mile or touch their toes. And Hollywood actors and actresses, as well as professional models, may be skinny and look fit, but also have very little strength and enjoy their physiques thanks to fad diets, cosmetic surgery and weight-loss drugs. There are a lot of “skinny-fat” people running around Hollywood and the fashion runways.

So just looking like you are in shape doesn’t necessarily qualify you as physically fit.

The 5 Components of Physical Fitness

Believe it or not, there is an objective standard that can be used to determine overall physical fitness, and it’s broader than whether you can put a basketball in a hoop or sport a great six pack.

While athletic ability or a lean physique may be outward signs of physical fitness, they alone aren’t enough to qualify a person as physically fit. To determine true fitness, you need to evaluate that person (as well as yourself) against the five recognized components of physical fitness.

Physical fitness is broken down into five fundamental components:

Cardiovascular Endurance
Muscular Strength
Muscular Endurance
Flexibility
Body Composition

While you may not have heard physical fitness broke down this neatly in the past, these are the main components of physical fitness, and should be at the core of any discussion around exercise, athletic performance and general health and fitness. In order to be considered truly fit, you’ll need to exhibit certain characteristics within each of these components.

Practically speaking, having a good understanding of these components of physical fitness can also help you make sure that your training and exercise routine (as well as your diet) supports improved fitness levels.

1. Cardiovascular Endurance

Cardiovascular endurance (also known as cardio-respiratory endurance) basically refers to ability of the lungs to transfer oxygen to the blood and to the heart’s ability to pump that oxygen-rich blood to your muscles and tissues. This is a critical component of physical fitness, since without that oxygen-rich blood, your body and muscles won’t be able to effectively perform work.

But cardiovascular endurance isn’t just about providing the oxygen you need to power your workouts or daily activities. It also has a wide range of health benefits. As cardiovascular endurance improves, your resting heart rate decreases — putting less stress on the heart even when performing light activity. This is one of the reasons that doctors almost always prescribe light cardiovascular exercise as preventative treatment for heart disease or high blood pressure.

Even if your goal is to train for muscle mass (for instance, if you are a bodybuilder), improving your cardiovascular endurance can help increase your stamina during weight training, reduce fatigue and even allow you to lift more weight or perform more reps.

2. Muscular Endurance

Muscular endurance is the second key component of physical fitness.

Muscular endurance is the ability to hold a particular position (muscle contraction) for a sustained period of time, or to repeat a movement many times without excessive fatigue. This could be the capability required to hold a two-pound weight above your head for five minutes or the effort required to lift that weight 20 consecutive times. In both cases, muscular endurance is involves the extended contraction of muscles against less-than-maximum weight.

Muscular endurance is important because it allows the muscle to work longer without fatigue, which is critical during for sports and recreational or daily activities. Without muscular endurance, you would be unable to run more than a few hundred yards, stand for long-periods of time, or participate in sports like biking, swimming or cross-country skiing.

3. Muscular Strength

The third component of physical fitness is muscular strength.

Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximum force, such as lifting the heaviest weight you can move, one time. It’s typically expressed as your One Rep Max (1RM) — or the amount of resistance you can move in a single rep.

Muscular strength may be localized to certain muscle groups, for instance you could have muscular strength in your legs, but not in your arms. Overall, you should aim for muscular strength across all muscle groups, especially your core (your torso, which includes back, abs and chest), since your torso is heavily involved in supporting and assisting in nearly all movement and activities.

Imbalances in muscular strength between opposing muscle groups (for example lower back and abdominal muscles) can increase the risk of acute and chronic injuries, including muscle pulls and tears and strains to connective tissue.

Muscular strength is important, because without it, you would be unable to participate in recreational sports, support your own body weight, or even lift yourself out of a chair. Improving muscular strength also has broader health benefits, including:

Improved bone density
Reduced risk of osteoporosis
Reduced risk for injury
Improved insulin sensitivity, which can reduce the risk of developing Type II diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome.

4. Flexibility

Flexibility is the fifth component of physical fitness.

Flexibility is simply the ability to move a joint through its full range of motion. In other words, how limber you are. A person’s level of flexibility is partly determined by genetics and their joint structure, but nearly all people are able to improve flexibility through regular static and dynamic stretching.

Flexibility is important because it allows you to perform certain daily activities like stretching to reach an item on a high shelf or bending down to pick something up off the floor.

Having a high-degree of flexibility discourages certain injuries and muscle-strains because flexibility allows you to better use proper form when performing activities like lifting objects. For example, people with tight, inflexible hamstring muscles (the muscles on the backs of your legs) will often compensate for this lack of flexibility, by lifting from the waist, versus through the legs and waist. This puts them at greater risk for lower back injuries.

In sports and recreational activities, improved flexibility can also enhance athletic performance, ensuring that you are using proper form and working a muscle through it’s full and natural range-of-motion — for example during weight or resistance training. Nearly all sports and activities can benefit from increased flexibility, but some — like gymnastics – require a very high-level of flexibility. In recreational sports like softball, basketball or soccer, increased flexibility can also improve power, balance and agility.

5. Body Composition

The final component of physical fitness is body composition.

Body composition simply is what your body is made up of. In other words, the proportion of lean tissue like bone, muscle, connective tissue, internal organs and water to your body fat levels.

Body composition is not based on your weight, hip-to-waist ratios, or inaccurate, one-size-fits-all formulas like Body Mass Index (BMI.) Instead, body composition looks at your percentage of lean tissue to fat ratio. This is important, because scale weight alone is a poor representation of a person’s actual physical fitness and body composition. Two people with the exact same height and weight, can have very different body compositions, depending on how much body fat or lean muscle they are carrying.

For example, a 5′ 3″, 130 lb female gymnast at 13% body fat will look much leaner than a woman with 25% body fat at the same weight and height. Because muscle takes up less volume on the body than fat, a person with more muscle and less body fat will always look leaner than someone at the same weight with less muscle and more body fat.

Having a body composition that reflects a higher muscle-to-body fat ratio is important, because body fat typically gets in the way of most activities. Body fat is metabolically-inactive and provides no strength or endurance advantage. It’s basically dead weight. Excess body fat can impede activity, negatively enhance physical or athletic performance, increase your risk of developing heart disease, stroke, Type II diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome.

Body composition is most easily determined using a pair of inexpensive body fat calipers. These calipers will give you an estimate (with a margin of error of about four percentage points in either direction) of your body fat percentage. You can then use this to estimate how much lean tissue you are carrying.

Because your goal should be to always shift your body composition in favor of muscle, while reducing body fat, regularly measuring your body fat percentage is a much more useful way to gauge your progress toward becoming leaner than a bathroom scale.

Benefits of Physical Fitness

Physical fitness isn’t something that only athletes can possess or something you tried to develop in 6th grade gym class. It’s the foundation for an active, healthy life. Being physically fit means being well rounded. And that requires attention to all five of these components of physical fitness.

For example, if you all you do is spend time in the weight room, but can’t run 100 yards without puking, then you’re not physically fit, regardless of what the mirror tells you or how much you can bench. Likewise, if your idea of staying fit and in-shape is an hour of cardio each day on the elliptical trainer, but you never touch a dumbbell or weight machine, you’re only getting the health benefits of one component of physical fitness. You’ll never achieve your potential with a pick-and-choose model like this.

By improving your performance in each of these five components of physical fitness, you build the basis for solid physical health, which also can help you live longer, be more mentally sharp and participate in activities that you enjoy. And these five components also have health benefits that go far beyond how you look at the beach, including less risk of heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, better cholesterol-levels, improved mood, more stamina and energy, a better sex life and less risk of injury as you age.

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