It is important that we first actually understand what personal fitness means, what are the components of it, how do we assess our own fitness levels and how can we improve on it. The main idea of personal fitness revolves around living a healthy lifestyle. It can be described as a state of health and well being, more specifically the ability to perform different tasks. This looks different for everyone from varying levels of fitness, different fitness goals and fitness mindsets. Living a healthy and active lifestyle has many different components to it such as nutrition, fitness, body composition and health implications.
Throughout this unit we will be looking at different types of fitness such as muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility and body composition. Muscular strength is how much force your muscles are able to exert against some form of resistance. An example of this could be someone at the gym bench pressing or somebody doing body weight squats. In both of these examples there is some form of resistance. Muscular endurance is the ability of your muscles to sustain an effort over a period of time, an example could be how push-ups are you able to do. Cardiovascular fitness is the ability of your heart and lungs to supply oxygen rich blood to the muscles that are working, for example going for a long distance run. Flexibility is the range of motion that your joints and muscles have, an example would be trying to touch your toes. Finally body composition which is the difference between fat and non-fat mass in your body.
However fitness is not the only thing that we should be concerned about, it is also very important to learn about nutrition. To live a healthy lifestyle we need to know what types of food we are putting into our body and how much of each type of food. There are four main food groups which are fruits and vegetables, grains, dairy and meat. We need a certain amount of nutrients from each of these food groups, you may hear that people cut out a certain type of food but that might not be always the safest thing to do. If you want to change your own diet it is important that you see your doctor first. This also goes for adding in different supplements into your diet. Below is a healthy plate that is suggest from Canada's Food Guide.
Canada's food guide also gives out main different tips for healthy eating such as, replacing sugary drinks with water. Choose foods with healthy fats instead of saturated fats. Limit cream sauces, gravy, deep-fried or battered foods, cakes, cookies and pastries. Don’t feel the need to finish everything on your plate. These are just a few of the tips that they offer.
The final thing that we are going to be looking at is putting this all together to live a healthy lifestyle. You need both nutrition and fitness to live a physically healthy lifestyle. However it is also important to be mentally healthy this includes your own mental health, it is important that you feel happy with yourself and not always comparing yourself to the person on the TV or to a friend. Everyone's healthy lifestyle looks different it is important to recognize this and not get to wrapped up on becoming the next Instagram "Fitspo".