Fitness is the ability to perform physical activities at a moderate intensity level. Exercise improves your body’s overall health and reduces your risk for many diseases. Contact Alta Climbing & Fitness now!
Try to get moderate amounts of exercise–however small–most days. Listen to your body and stop exercising if it feels uncomfortable. Exercise can be anything from walking or dancing to gardening or swimming.

The ability to withstand force or pressure. This can be physical — like doing 100 pushups or running a marathon — or mental, such as staying focused on an assignment. Strength can also be associated with certain people, occupations or cultures, and it’s often a trait that’s admired in others, especially athletes.
According to a widely cited, peer-reviewed research paper, there are five main components of fitness: aerobic exercise, muscle endurance and strength, flexibility and body composition. Performing exercises that improve these qualities can help maintain good health and reduce the risk of some diseases.
Exercise can be anything that increases your heart rate and breathing, such as jogging, dancing or swimming. It can also be an activity that increases your strength, such as lifting weights or doing pull-ups. Strength training can be done in a gym, at home or as part of a group exercise class.
Although strength is one of the five major biomotor components that contribute to athletic performance, it can be considered a foundational layer and is generally performed at the beginning of a training cycle. The other four are speed, mobility, skill and endurance. Once an athlete has improved their strength, they can begin to focus on other aspects of their athletic performance, such as power. In this case, increasing their power requires a greater emphasis on training that includes other biomotor components, such as speed and agility.
Endurance
Endurance is the ability to exercise for a long time without getting tired. It’s often compared to a marathon or other long-distance running races, but it also applies to other exercises like cycling or lifting weights. Increasing your endurance requires time, effort and consistent practice.
There are two main types of endurance: cardiovascular and muscular. Cardiovascular endurance relates to how well your heart and blood vessels can supply oxygen during physical activity, says Hosbein. When you build up your cardiovascular endurance, you can work out for longer periods of time and at higher intensities than someone who hasn’t.
Muscular endurance is the ability of your muscles to contract repeatedly against a force for a long period of time, says McLester. When you train for endurance events, such as a marathon, you develop both your cardiovascular and muscular endurance, she adds.
To improve your endurance, start by gradually increasing the amount of time and intensity of your workouts, says McLester. New exercisers typically see improvements in their endurance fairly quickly, she adds. But even advanced exercisers can improve their endurance by purposefully increasing the length and intensity of their workouts. For example, if you’re a cyclist, increase your riding distance or speed over a period of weeks. For example, start by walking for 30 minutes then slowly increase your time over several days or weeks. Then move on to brisk walking or up hills.
Flexibility
Flexibility is the ability of your muscles and joints to move through a full range of motion without discomfort. It can help improve performance, promote correct posture, maintain proper muscle length and balance and decrease injury risk. Flexibility exercises include stretches, yoga and tai chi.
Strength or resistance training is any exercise that strengthens a specific group of muscles against external resistance. Examples of this type of exercise are weightlifting, pushing and pulling movements, using resistance bands and your own bodyweight.
Cardiorespiratory Fitness Your heart is a muscular organ that pumps blood throughout your entire body to supply it with oxygen and nutrients. It’s important to keep your heart healthy and able to pump blood effectively to prevent disease. Exercise is the most effective way to keep your heart flexible.
Flexibility is the ability of your muscles and connective tissues to elongate or stretch. It’s also important to maintain flexibility as you age because it can help reduce joint pain and improve your overall quality of life. Exercises that increase flexibility include stretching, which involves systematically moving the joint through its full range of motion, and dynamic movement, such as running or jumping. Static stretching, which includes holding the joint in a stretched position for a period of time, is another way to increase flexibility. This type of stretching is often used in standard warmup exercises. It can be beneficial for both beginners and experienced athletes.
Balance
Balance is the ability to synchronize and coordinate both sides of the body. It is essential in maintaining healthy, strong, flexible joints and muscles as well as a healthy cardiovascular system. It also helps improve posture and coordination. In dance, it refers to a step in which the weight is lightly shifted from one foot to the other, the dancer sinking down on the heel of the foot to which she is shifting and flexing the knees.
In the early 20th century, a number of activities such as aerobics, step aerobics, jogging, conditioning and bodybuilding were used to define fitness. Today, there are many more activities that are referred to as fitness training.
Coordination
Coordination is the ability to synchronize different actions in order to perform a complex task. It is an important component of physical fitness and can be developed through training, practice, and skill acquisition. It is an important factor in sports and everyday life, and it allows people to move through their environment with ease and efficiency. Coordination can also help in solving problems by promoting teamwork and communication within an organization.
A central issue in coordination research is understanding how and why the nervous system selects particular movements given the large set of possible combinations of effectors. For example, when throwing a ball, there are ten possible degrees of freedom for the shoulder and index finger movement and over 40 muscles that could be actuated to control these movements. However, the neural estimates of the state of the fingers and shoulder do not consistently correlate to produce a stable motion that achieves the goal of throwing the ball [58].
Another issue in coordination research is understanding why systematic correlations between effectors are observed. For instance, when the fingers and arm reach for a button, there is a strong correlation between the state of the index finger and the velocity of the hand towards the button. This kind of coupling is not predicted by optimal feedback control theory (OFCT). It is thought that OFCT may provide a misleading picture of the complexity of the task because it only considers internal constraints in the controller.
Sleep
While you sleep, your heart rate, breathing and body temperature drop. Cells throughout your body store up energy they’ve used during the day so that they can continue working during the night. This energy conservation and storage are important reasons why people need enough restorative sleep to feel refreshed when they wake up. Your circadian rhythm regulates your sleep drive, and it’s a good idea to maintain a regular bedtime and wake time.
On a normal night, you cycle through four or five sleep cycles. The first stage of non-REM sleep — called stage 1 non-REM sleep — is a short period of light sleep that occurs as you doze off. During this phase, your heartbeat and breathing slow and muscles relax with the occasional twitches.