What Is Fitness?
One of the best ways to identify the limits of a person’s physical development is to see how accurately they can answer this simple question: What is fitness?
Right now, you might be scrambling for a textbook definition, or perhaps you are visualizing a picture of someone you consider "fit." Because most people cannot define the term, they generally don't know how to change their fitness, let alone improve it.
The problem isn’t that there is a strict right or wrong answer. The problem is that your definition dictates where you invest your effort.
Without a clear answer, effort is misplaced.
Imagine we defined “building a foundation” as digging holes in the dirt. While this is the action required, there is a very large difference between digging randomly, or sporadically, and defining the edges, the depth, and the tools;let alone the duration that you will work.
Fitness is relative; it changes according to the application. However, a good starting point is this:
“Fitness is the collection of attributes and behaviors required for survival.”
This feels light-years away from the fitness industry's marketing. To understand it, we must look at the origin of the word survival—the Latin supervivere, meaning “to live beyond.” This meaning remained largely unchanged until Herbert Spencer used it in the context of natural selection. There, fitness became synonymous with “biological success.”
The evolution of the word charts a fascinating path: To outlive (a lifespan), to inherit (genetics), to endure (disaster), to adapt (nature), and finally, to persist (identity).
This begs the question: Fit for what?
Arguments constantly rage between camps trying to sell their specific brand of fitness. People will scream at the top of their lungs for what benefitted them. But these absolutist statements move us away from understanding fitness as an individual pursuit of biological success.
Fitness is easy to define if you use a sport as a measuring stick. We know the precise power output required to win the Tour de France or to be crowned the World’s Strongest Man. Even aesthetics can be quantified. But what if you don’t have a sport? Can we simply piecemeal together the abs of Brad Pitt, the pulling power of Eddy Hall, and the endurance of Lance Armstrong?
Nature says no, we cannot borrow attributes from another human any more than we can train to be a zebra or a lion. You can mimic the actions and ingredients of your favorite influencer, but you are allowing someone else to define, not only fitness, but all; the experiences that creating your fitness leads to.
Fitness is about developing the attributes that you believe enhance your life. If having abs enhances your life in this society, then training for them is valid. Functional fitness is not an abstract concept; it is simply a measure of how well an attribute transfers into a direct benefit for you.
We must look at fitness through the lens of what is missing. We must identify the constraints that lock up our potential. The good news? If you can’t recognize a specific deficit, your fitness is likely so underdeveloped that anything you do will be of immense help—sometimes we have to start digging before we can identify the edges.
We have more information than ever before, yet fewer people are developing themselves physically. That is because fitness is not a knowledge problem; it’s a meaning problem. We have converted the attributes of survival into an industry that survives off our insecurity. In doing so, we have lost the meaning of being physically capable, reducing it to nothing more than a number on a bar or a metric of leanness.
So to accurately define fitness for yourself, first look at the reason you are drawn to it, in this case, the question turns into:
“What does fitness mean to you?”
