As I’m sure you already know…exercise provides enormous benefits for overall health and wellness! But understanding precisely what types of fitness to engage in can be confusing! 

A vast array of exercise options are available to choose from, including weight training, yoga, personal training, boot camps, fitness classes, running, and a broad range of various home gym equipment to make working out more convenient and easy (read more for reviews). The market is amassing with new trends coming out each day! 

There’s something for everybody, whether you want to workout at the gym, run outdoors, get fit with friends, go to a trampoline park, or workout in the comfort of your own home, like lots of my PT clients, for example…

The gorilla bow home gym is a great piece of gym equipment to purchase if you want to workout in the comfort of your home. There are lots of my personal training clients who don’t like going to the gym and use this piece of equipment to workout at home. I also have some guys who take it on the road, when they travel with work!

It’s about doing exercise that you enjoy and that suits your lifestyle!

Start Young!

The earlier you start your fitness regime, the better! Starting your fitness regimen young will give you a massive advantage throughout life. Go to https://healthymagazine.com/the-importance-of-physical-fitness-in-children-2/ to learn the benefits for children. That said, if you are in your 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s… and you’ve never really invested much effort in your health and fitness, don’t despair, it’s never too late to make a change!

Let’s now look at the different components of fitness and how they can benefit your health, fitness, and well-being:

Components of Fitness

Physical fitness plays an integral part of health and wellness. Understanding the various elements of fitness will assist in ensuring that you choose the best option for you and your goal(s). 

#1 Cardio

Hiking, running, walking, swimming, or biking are all examples of cardiovascular fitness, also referred to as cardio. When you work on this element of fitness, you will increase your stamina, meaning you will be able to exercise for longer and build a healthy and efficient heart. Also, as you get fit, you will notice that you can do more and work at a faster pace, BUT with much less effort. 

#2 Movement & Flexibility

Yoga, stretching, Pilates, anything that requires flexibility is the next component. This style of training is essential! It will help you improve your posture, reduce aches and pains, and also prevent injury. Here are two great exercises to try:

#3 Resistance Training

Weight lifting, such as bench presses, squats, and deadlifts, are examples of ways to gain muscular strength. Weight training, when done correctly and consistently, will boost your strength, speed up your metabolism, improve your body composition, and burn body fat!

If you’re new to weight training, hire a personal trainer to teach you how to execute exercises correctly. A good coach will be able to give you exercises that give you the most bang for your buck and make sure that you are doing them correctly. 

#4 Muscular Endurance

When you think of the component of muscular endurance, generally, this would be along the lines of long-distance activities such as triathlons or marathons and cycling or swimming events.

Endurance is to what extent the muscles can tolerate repetition. If you want to improve your muscular endurance, you could do things such as high rep weight training. Endurance weight training will improve both your cardio and also increase muscle tone. 

#5 Power

Strength + speed makes up the component of power. Jumping, sprinting, and plyometrics are some excellent power training examples. To increase your power, you first need to focus on technique (make sure you are executing the exercise correctly). Then you can work on adding weight and then finally increasing the speed. People typically do power training once they have had lots of weight training experience – I wouldn’t recommend it for beginners 

#6 Balance

Balance is one component that most people neglect in their health and wellness regimen, whether it be to control your position when standing on one foot to put on a sock or positioning yourself on an uneven surface.

To improve balance, you should work on proprioception, which is touch, vision, and vestibular or inner ear. To begin this process, you start with standing on a single foot. Once that is no longer a challenge, you do so while looking at the ceiling, and then try by closing your eyes. The subtle progression works all three aspects of the senses and develops a healthy balance.

Conclusion

With the understanding of how the various components of physical fitness work together in cultivating a healthy body, you can develop the appropriate exercise regimen! There’s also lots of free information online to help you with your fitness and health, take this link for example. You can never read enough! Just make sure you choose a reliable source of information. Please also feel free to check out my fitness blog, where there are over 1,000 articles!

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

Nick