Physical fitness is the state of health and well-being associated with the ability to perform daily tasks and activities. Being physically fit enables you to look, feel, and do your best. This pillar focuses on the heart, lungs, and muscles of your body!

Heart

Exercising your heart like any other muscle is vitally important. Your heart constantly works to pump blood, carrying oxygen and other nutrients to the brain, muscles, and other vital organs. Exercise helps to increase the efficiency of this process which decreases the stress you put on your heart. Regular exercise can help to reduce blood pressure, maintain a healthy body weight, and decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease1.

Lungs  

The oxygen that your heart supplies to the rest of your body comes from the lungs! Exercise makes your muscles work harder which uses up more oxygen. This increase in demand is what causes your breathing rate to increase and your heart to pump faster to replenish the oxygen you are using. A healthy set of lungs will often have a larger reserve of oxygen and will work more efficiently to replenish used oxygen2. 

Muscles

The final piece to the puzzle is your muscles. Your muscles are responsible for your ability to move and so much more. They deal with everything from chewing and speaking to walking and lifting. Strength training has been proven to support your joints and prevent injuries. Regular exercise can also increase the strength of your muscles which will increase their efficiency. The more efficient your muscles are, the less oxygen they require to move2. They are also better at burning calories and maintaining a healthy body mass. Muscles will also grow from exercise! This growth is one of the most energy-consuming processes in the cell and therefore will burn more calories3.

With all that said, how does Lifestyle Systems work on the fitness pillar?

Exercise  

Strength and Cardiovascular Training! During our systems, we incorporate both of these two components. Strength training helps to increase the efficiency of your muscles to burn more calories, while cardiovascular training strengthens your heart and lungs. We will be incorporating both throughout our systems to get moving! FORM IS KEY! To avoid injury presently and in the future, your form needs to be a top priority. If you are just getting started, we will help you to start slowly and build as you go. It’s important not to do too much, too quickly so that we avoid injury and burnout. If you are an advanced athlete who’s already crushing CrossFit and HIIT classes, we don’t require you to change a thing! We will give you accessory work so you can stabilize your joints and step up your game further.  

Mobility and Flexibility

Mobility and flexibility are the second focus of the fitness pillar. Mobility is the ability of a joint to move through a specific range of motion while flexibility is the ability of a muscle to be lengthened. When you exercise, your muscles begin to tighten as they grow. To counteract this, we need to regularly mobilize and stretch to avoid injury. Regular stretching helps to increase your flexibility. The benefit of enhancing your body’s flexibility is that it allows you to perform exercises with proper form! Mobility also works to achieve proper form. If you are flexible but you cannot move through a squat properly, you will not have the body mechanics necessary to safely perform the movement. When this occurs, your body often utilizes other muscles in the area to compensate for your lack of mobility which can lead to overdeveloping specific muscle groups and risking injury. We will be regularly tackling this throughout the program!

Rest and Recovery

Rest and recovery are the last things on the agenda to discuss. You may be a bit confused as to why our fitness pillar has rest as a part of it. All of the stress you place on your body during exercise and resistance training causes damage to cells. If you have ever done a really hard workout after not exercising for a while, you have probably experienced delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). This is typically caused by small tears in your muscle fibers that cause your body to respond to damaged tissue, further inflaming the muscles. This is why you will tend to feel pain and stiffness. As your body adapts to exercise, this process will become less frequent as you are adapting to the demand you are requiring. However, this is also a message from your body that it needs some time to recover! Allowing your body some time to rest during the week is just as important as the exercise itself. Your muscles will rebuild and grow during this rest period. Rest allows your muscles to grow and become more efficient, more efficient muscles burn more calories, and more calories burned means you get healthier, and faster!

Now that you know a bit more about the importance of incorporating fitness and how we do things, we are ready to move on to our next pillar, Nutrition. Two things that all of our pillars have in common are time and consistency. No shortcuts. You have to show up, put some work in, and stay at it. We got your back! Don’t be overwhelmed, get excited! We are in this together!

Dr. Brock Brady PhD

References

(1)      Thompson, P. D.; Buchner, D.; Piña, I. L.; Balady, G. J.; Williams, M. A.; Marcus, B. H.; Berra, K.; Blair, S. N.; Costa, F.; Franklin, B.; Fletcher, G. F.; Gordon, N. F.; Pate, R. R.; Rodriguez, B. L.; Yancey, A. K.; Wenger, N. K. Exercise and Physical Activity in the Prevention and Treatment of Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease: A Statement from the Council on Clinical Cardiology (Subcommittee on Exercise, Rehabilitation, and Prevention) and the Council on Nutrition, Physical. Circulation. 2003, pp 3109–3116. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.CIR.0000075572.40158.77.

(2)      Barskaya, G. Your Lungs and Exercise. Breathe 2016, 12 (1), 97–100. https://doi.org/10.1183/20734735.elf121.

(3)      Rolfe, D. F. S.; Brown, G. C. Cellular Energy Utilization and Molecular Origin of Standard Metabolic Rate in Mammals. Physiol. Rev. 1997, 77 (3), 731–758. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.1997.77.3.731.