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What Are the Four Components of Health & Physical Fitness?

People of all ages who are inactive can improve their health, well-being and fitness by being more active regularly. However, for most it’s difficult to adopt new habits and routines. So start slowly and work your way up, and before long you will adopt a healthy new fitness routine.

Your overall fitness is made up of four key components. In order to assess your level of fitness, you must consider all of these components together. Here’s a blurb about each component.

man on elliptical for article about exercise components and training

Cardio-respiratory endurance is your body’s ability to supply fuel during sustained physical activity by way of your circulatory and respiratory systems. To improve it, try to keep your heart rate elevated for a sustained length of time such as walking, swimming, or bicycling. Remember that the cardiorespiratory activity you choose does not have to be strenuous. Start slowly and work your way up to a more intense pace.

Muscular strength is your muscle’s ability to exert force. You make your muscles stronger by working them against a resistance. Gravity offers a great source of resistance, so be creative.

Muscular endurance is your muscle’s ability to perform without fatigue for a period of time. Cardio-respiratory activities such as walking, jogging, bicycling, or dancing helps improve muscle endurance.

Flexibility refers to your joints range of motion. Joint flexibility helps prevent injuries, so adopt a basic stretching program. Remember that stretching can be done periodically throughout your day.

Get yourself moving with these four key components in mind, and get health and fitness on your side!

Exercise Adaptation, Muscle Adaptation Fitness Effects

To increase your fitness level you must move, and moving in a manner with specific intent to develop your fitness is what’s referred to as exercise. Exercise is a process for which your body will adapt to a stress with increasing fitness provided it’s above the intensity of the current adaptation.

So in order to improve your level of fitness you must overload. Otherwise, exercise adaptation has the fitness of effects of remaining the same or atrophy in response to less.

The fitness effects of exercise adaptation is most dramatic in skeletal muscle. Muscle adaptation is the effect of muscle’s ability to quickly accommodate a tolerable increase in the load. However, should you overload a muscles ability to adapt, then over-training is the fitness effects. And the load for positive exercise adaptation varies dramatically among individuals.

Significant improvement in fitness can occur when appropriate stresses are introduced during exercise. For optimal muscle adaptation effects, exercises must be designed with adequate intensity and duration. The type of fitness you want to develop must be considered, be it predominantly muscle adaptation to build up strength or endurance.

Muscular adaptation to high resistance, low repetition builds strength, the fitness effects of weight lifting. Whereas, the opposite builds endurance, for instance exercise adaptation to running.

Rest is vital to reap the maximal fitness effects through exercise as well. Not enough recovery results in diminished capacity of your muscles to exert the force necessary to produce muscle adaptation. What the ideal rest period is not scientifically known, but going max three to four times per week seems to be historically sound for exercise adaptation.

In order to improve the level of fitness, you must progressively increase the load because of the effects of exercise adaptation. And muscles adapt specifically to the nature of the stress. Even if you are just after general fitness effects, you’ll still need to move enough to stimulate some adaptation.