What is Fitness?

If fitness is to be the goal of any exercise program, one must first have a idea of what fitness is.

Improving fitness is commonly believed to be nothing more than improving strength, endurance, and body fat. While this sounds like common sense, my philosophy is that we should achieve fitness that is both broader and more specific.

Fitness is the ability to overcome life’s demands. Sometimes these demands include things like lifting, carrying, pulling, pushing, and throwing objects or our own bodyweight. The common definition of fitness does not take into account the balance, coordination, accuracy, and agility to required to overcome such demands and neither do common exercise prescriptions.

Enter functional fitness. Functional fitness takes into account that many of life’s demands require exercises that are specific to the movements that we perform in real life. For example, the strength to correctly lift a bag of groceries or a child is best developed by practicing lifting objects from the ground. But when was the last time lifting weights off the ground was part of your fitness routine?

Not only do functional exercises that mimic real life activities build useful strength, but they are also the most potent fat burners when done with lighter weights, higher repetitions, and lots of intensity. No more 45-60 minutes of cardio in the "fat burning" zone. 20 or less minutes is all you need.

Elite Fitness.