Health Verses Fitness: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters
On one hand, there’s the rail thin cross-country athlete, who runs 40-50 miles per week. She eats a single cheerio for breakfast, a lettuce leaf for lunch, and a banana for dinner. On the other hand, there’s the overweight mother of two, who goes on a 30-minute walk with her family after work each day. Then, they sit down to a meal of fresh fruit, turkey sandwiches on whole-wheat, and skim milk. Of these women, who is healthy and who is fit?
Difference Between Health and Fitness
Let’s start by defining health verses fitness. Health is the overall condition of our mind or body. It is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or injury (World Health Organization, 1948).
Fitness is the body’s ability to respond or adapt to the demands and stress of physical effort. The five components of fitness include: cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition.
Thus, health and fitness are not the same thing. A person can be healthy and not fit, as well as fit and not healthy. Ideally, of course, a person is both healthy and fit.
So, who’s fit and who’s healthy?
Answer: the cross-country runner is fit, but not healthy. The overweight woman is healthy, but not fit. Why?
The cross-country runner has great cardiovascular fitness, muscular endurance, a lean body composition, and is relatively flexible. These are components of fitness. However, due to her poor eating habits (i.e. insufficient nutrient intake), at the young age of 21, she has menstrual disturbances and osteoporosis. If she continues this lifestyle, she will soon have stress fractures in her legs among other injuries. Thus, she is not healthy.
Likewise, the body builder at the gym, we’ll call him Arnold, is also fit but not healthy. He has muscular strength and endurance, relative flexibility, and a lean body composition. However, his excessive steroid use has caused elevated blood pressure, decreased heart function, depression, aggression, and mood swings, among other side effects.
Conversely, the overweight stroller walking mom, is healthy but not fit. She eats a nutritious diet and meets the minimum recommendation for weekly physical activity. As a result, she has lowered her risk for many chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, type II diabetes, stroke, and some cancers. Her walking regimen has also increased her feelings of energy and improved her mental well-being. But since she doesn’t do vigorous activity or resistance training, she doesn’t achieve the associated fitness benefits like muscular strength and endurance and improved body composition from increased muscle mass.
The Means to the End Matters
Please don’t hear me saying that all distance runners and weightlifters are unhealthy, anorexic, steroid users! Instead, let’s acknowledge that achieving fitness by unhealthy means has a cost to our health. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, you can be overweight and still be healthy, if you eat a healthy diet and are physically active. Just the same, if you are thin but you do not exercise, it is unlikely that you are healthy because exercises is necessary for a healthy cardiovascular profile. Thus, being thin and healthy are not synonymous.
Where do we start- Health or Fitness?
If you’re a beginning or sporadic exerciser, focus on improving health. Eat a nutritious diet of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and lean meats. Achieve the minimum amount of weekly exercise of 150 minutes of moderate-vigorous activity.
After you have habitualized your regular aerobic exercise routine and are ready to take the next steps in your health and fitness, add resistance training to your regimen. Research shows resistance training improves muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, body composition, metabolism, self-confidence, physical function, and decreases risk for injury.
In summary, let’s live healthy active lifestyles, eat nutritiously, avoid steroids and questionable supplements, and take steps toward both health and fitness.
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References:
Body Builder. Creative Commons, Retrieved from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Kenneth_Schwarzenegger.jpg.
Thin person. Retrieved from: Unsplash photo.com. kira-ikonnikova-156668.
World Health Organization. Retrieved from: http://www.who.int/suggestions/faq/en/.
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