Fitness is fitness, right?

One of the most important abilities of a coach who is training a student over the long term is the ability to sit and listen. Using the occasionally prod to get the students to keep talking, it’s amazing how many of their problems they already have the answer to inside themselves. The process of vocalising (or even writing things down) seems to help ‘congnitise’ an issue (I know that’s not a word, but it fits).

Discussing the transferability of aspects of fitness between different sports one client recently stated:

“But fitness, is fitness. Isn’t it?”

That statement pretty much summed up that they already knew the answer. Which is ‘yes and no’.

Fitness

noun

  1. the condition of being physically fit and healthy. “disease and lack of fitness are closely related”.
  2. the quality of being suitable to fulfil a particular role or task. “the medical board assessed his fitness for active service”.

So ‘fitness’ has a specific quality for a specific task. A person can be fit for one thing but, perhaps, not another.

Ok, but we need to break it down a bit more.

Fit

adjective

  1. of a suitable quality, standard, or type to meet the required purpose. “the house was not fit for human habitation”.
  2. In good health, especially because of regular physical activity. “my family keep me fit by walking and cycling”.

verb

  1. be the right shape and size for. “those jeans still fit me”.
  2. install or fix (something) into place. “they fitted smoke alarms to their home”.

noun

  1. the particular way in which something, especially a garment or component, fits. “the dress was a perfect fit”.

From the adjective, we see that physical ability and a specific purpose are intertwined in the meaning of the word ‘fit’.

What about the history of the word?

Etymology of the word: Fit

Old norse (1580’s) ‘fitja’, to knit. [This is one possible source.]

So, we have a term that is used to describe physical capability to perform a specific task. So from that we can take it that there are different types of fitness. A marathon runner is fit to run long distances, a powerlifter is fit to lift really heavy things once or twice and then require 10 minutes of rest before repeating. Both are fit for their specific purpose, but if they were to switch sports for a minute… well a minute might be all either of them last.

lance-armstrong-marathon-new-york

When Lance Armstrong decided to run the New York marathon, having never run more than 16 miles in training, everyone thought that the guy with the worlds best recorded (at the time) VO2max would find it a walk in the park. Weren’t we all surprised when it took him 2 hours 59 minutes 36 seconds? [896th place, this is a damn good showing by the way and not intended as a knock on the guy. We have other reasons to knock on Armstrong…]

And that was a guy who was considered an endurance god!

My own personal preference are the combat sports. Skills aside for the moment the capacities we’re looking for are maximum strength, power, speed and gruelling work capacity to be sustained for no longer than 2 to 5 minutes for 2 to 5 rounds with 1 minute rests, discipline dependant. All to be delivered within a specific weight restriction and also allowing the fighter time/energy in the week to practice their art. We need an aerobic base for sure, but is running long distances the way to develop that? No. Sure, there is an argument for 5 x 5 minutes or 12 x 3 minutes fights that running will help with the aerobic base but I think that many fight coaches use this as a ‘deload’ and ‘Zen time’ for their fighters. Fighters/athletes will always find trouble to occupy their time unless we find something else to occupy them with!

So being fit for one thing doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be fit for another.

But.

For sure there are activities that have massive carry over to each other.

  • Rock climbing and grappling sports.
  • Basketball and sprinting/middle distance running.
  • Olympic lifting and throwing.
  • Gymnastics and pretty much anything.

Being good at one doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to be good at the other. But you’ll have a lot of the physical attributes in place to make it easier.

I like the idea of the Nordic root of fitness to mean ‘knit’. I’m a great believer in that whatever we are doing, we should tie/knit the whole body together. We should make sure that none of our threads come loose and unravel the whole. There are a few exercises that knit the body together in this synergistic way:

  • Rolling
  • Crawling
  • Tumbling
  • Turkish Get Ups

In theory these four things are the same thing (a rolling pattern, ground based, gait based or both and loaded). TGUs in particular have huge carryover to running, cycling, powerlifting, grappling, or any sport in which you move.

 

Unilateral or contra-lateral exercises also have a fantastic ability to ‘tie you together’. The one armed or one legged variations on exercises are fantastic in this regard:

  • One arm swing/push up/row
  • One legged squat/deadlift/hop
  • Bird dog/superman variations
  • etc

So back to our original question:

“But fitness, is fitness. Isn’t it?”

It depends. Fitness is as we’ve discovered, a context dependant term. There is carry over from certain sports/activities to others. Some ‘fitness tools’ have a better carry over than others and these are the sort of things that help us tie/knit our body together.

Do some soul searching. Decide your goal and then figure out if you are supporting yourself or if you are dragging yourself back with your choices. Is what you are doing supporting what you want to achieve or be?

Be fit, be strong, be happy!

/by