WHAT IS PHYSICAL FITNESS?

Physical Fitness can be defined as the ability to carry out daily activities without having excessive fatigue and still have enough energy for emergencies. Physical fitness can be divided into two components namely;

A.Health-Related Fitness: This can be defined as the physical fitness activities that improve an individual's physical health and quality of life. Components of health-related fitness include; cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition.

B. Performance-Related Fitness: This can be defined as physical fitness activities to improve performance during games and sports. It is also referred to as skill-related physical fitness. Examples include; agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, and speed.


I Was Up the mountain in Nigeria, West Africa at 6am here


Factors such as age, gender, disability influences physical fitness. For example, the muscular strength of a 5 years old boy would naturally be weaker than that of an 18 years old girl. This, however, does not mean that the 5 years old boy is weaker. Hence the fitness test and norm table are needed to assess the various fitness index of individuals and group them based on a scale usually from excellent to poor.

So how does this work? Let's take for example the push-up test to determine an individual's muscular endurance of the upper body.

* Source: adapted from Golding, et al. (1986). The Y's way to physical fitness (3rd ed.)

From the table above we can observe the effect of age and gender on the muscular endurance level of individuals. This is similar to almost all fitness test with men expected to do better than women physically and youths expected to do better than younger/older people.

How to Reference this article 

Ademola, V. D (2019). What is physical fitness? Retrieved from https://www.youdread.com/2019/01/what-is-physical-fitness.html