Exercising For Health vs. Fitness

I think we can all agree that exercise is a good thing, regardless of how motivated we may or may not be to do it. The questions that remains are whether a particular activity can be called “exercise” and whether one type of exercise is better than another. Sports are a great example of this. I love basketball! I don’t play it anymore but I find it really fun to watch and can appreciate that it’s even more fun to play. Is playing basketball exercise? If so, is it good exercise? This depends on what you mean by good exercise.

What is good exercise?

If a client of mine asks me my opinion about an activity they engage in from the standpoint of it being good or bad, I always ask first what is the primary reason they are doing that activity. Recently I had been working with a client who had been running for exercise in the past but had stopped because it was impacting his health in negative ways. After a few sessions he was feeling much better and he asked me if I thought he should go back to running. I asked him “do you like running?” His answer was an unqualified “No”. I then told him that I would not recommend he start running again.

Now I know an awful lot of people LOVE to run and to anyone who loves to run I would say this – if you love it and it’s not impacting your health in ways that are interferring with other important activities or responsibilities in your life then absolutely you should run. But if you don’t love it, then I really don’t recommend it as I belive it puts too much stress on the body in a variety of ways to really be healthful. Frankly I don’t think running is “good exercise.” And I would say the same thing about a lot of what serves as exercise in the fitness realm these days.

Why are we exercising?

This brings up an important point. We don’t always exercise for health reasons. Or, we place our psychological health ahead of our physical health, if those can really be separated. By this I mean many people enjoy and hugely benefit from the satisfaction that an intense, demanding workout brings. It’s reinforcing to work hard and feel like we’ve accomplished something physically challenging. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing this.

But if I am running a lot and I’m having joint pain that is affecting my ability to move in other ways and this pain is getting worse and I am experiencing some level of debilitation as a result or I see debilitation looming on the horizon then I need to reasses whether running is really the form of exercise I ought to be doing and start considering other options.

What is fitness?

Exercise done for reasons OTHER than promoting health I would generally categorize as a fitness activity. Fitness activities are a type of training used to become proficient at or “fit for” that same activity or a related one. If I want to be good at basketball then I should practice things that will improve my game and make me more “fit” as a basketball player. Will those same activities make me a healthy person? In some ways maybe, but in many ways clearly not. Just look at the athetes who play basketball professionally for a long time. They are frequently hobbled. Kobe Bryant and his knees come to mind.

Movement and Exercise

On the most fundamental level human beings thrive on movement. The better we move and the greater variety of movements we’re able to execute the greater potential we have for health and longevity. Movement is not sexy, but it is essential. Elderly people who fall down and break their hip often decline very quickly, even if they were functioning pretty well beforehand. Once our movement becomes very limited then our health immediately suffers. If you’ve ever suffered a serious injury that severly curtails your activity you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Exercising for health

Exercise that is done for health reasons is also a type of fitness activity in that it makes us more “fit” for fullfilling our human needs. On the most basic level our human needs consist of eating, sleeping and procreation with most of the fitness requirements related to eating in the form of food gathering and preparation. To eat a varied diet, our hunter gatherer ancestors needed to move and move in a lot of different ways from squatting to digging to climbing to chopping to grinding.

The what and why of exercise

Now that we have outsourced so much of the movement in our diet we don’t even think about all of the work that went into bringing our farro, arugula, beet and goat cheese salad to the table. The substiute for all of the digging, fertilizing, harvesting, picking, feeding, milking, processing, packaging and shipping that went into our salad has become exercise. Therefore if we wish to replace these outsourced movements with exercise, that exercise should have a significant variety of postures and movements. A single activity with a repetitive and limited movement profile like running won’t provide the variety of movements that will make us “fit” for the variety of human activities that keep us healthy. Again if you love running (or some other limited movement profile fitness activity) do it, but see if for what it is and what it isn’t. It IS going to make you very fit for running but it ISN’T going to make you fit for meeting your human needs.

Haven’t we adapted to modern life?

I suppose there’s an argument to be made that as our lifestyles have changed our needs have changed with them. Haven’t we as human beings adapted to the more sedentary lifestyle we now lead? Certainly we have. After all our bodies and our minds are extremely efficient in adapting to change. I can train myself to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day and have lunch delivered to my office. But is that what I want to be fit for? Sitting and eating takeout? Are those adaptations manifesting health?

Our bodies and minds adapt to the input they are given and therefore it’s the things we do most often that have the biggest impact on our health and function. It is this fact that we need to consider when making choices about exercise because ultimately it won’t be the 1 hour per day of exercise that has the greatest impact on our health but rather what we’re doing for the other 23 hours. How does the activity we’re spending an hour doing affect us during the rest of our day? Is our 1 hour of exercise making us more fit for enjoying a high quality of life? Or are we simply making ourselves fit for a single activity that may or may not be good for us in the long run?