Developing Your Judo #25

#25: What Is Fitness?

Competitive judoka need to be fit.  Heck, everyone needs to be fit.  But what constitutes fitness?  Being able to run a marathon? Competing in a decathlon?  Climbing Mt. Everest?  Winning the judo world championship?  Or having a blood pressure reading of 105 / 55? Or a VO² max of 60 ml/kg/min?  It's difficult to come up with a definition for fitness. Some authorities claim that being healthy and fit are two different entities. So just because you are fit, it doesn't mean you are necessarily healthy.  Doesn't make sense, does it?  

Wellness is all the rage these days. To achieve a wellness state, you try to get all your body's physical parameters within accepted "healthy" guidelines. For example, your blood pressure should be about 120/70, and your LDL and HDL cholesterol should be within specific ranges.  You try to achieve these goals through a healthy diet and exercise.  But athletes need to be much "healthier" than this. They need to reach a "super-wellness" condition in order to meet the demands of arduous, sometimes brutal, training and high-pressure competitions.  You can view health as a continuum: sickness on one extreme and fitness on the other. Wellness, or being healthy, would sit between these two extremes.

Sickness ↔ Wellness ↔ Fitness

By: Rainer Fischer (Canadian Olympian)