Health Versus Fitness

"The condition of being sound in body, mind, and spirit ... freedom from physical disease or pain." Would you say this statement defines, health or fitness? While Webster's Dictionary offers virtually no distinction between the terms, the exercise industry does. Experts have been in agreement for some time that although health and fitness certainly share many components, they really are different.

In a simplified sense, "fitness" can be viewed as performance oriented, while "health" is more disease oriented. Fitness is measured from a performance standpoint with various physical feats. Health, on the other hand, is measured by cholesterol levels, blood pressure readings, and the presence of disease.

Improving Fitness

As a dance fitness program, the goal of Jazzercise is to impact a person's fitness level. Our program is designed to improve cardiovascular and respiratory efficiency, enhance muscular strength and flexibility, and impact fat loss.

Indirectly, Jazzercise can positively impact a person's health by: improving HDL cholesterol levels, reducing stress, burning excess calories to assist with weight loss, increasing bone density, decreasing blood pressure, and improving glucose tolerance.

By now, you are well aware of the formula for improving fitness - aerobic activity performed from three to five days per week for 15 to 60 minutes per day at 55 to 90 percent of maximum heart rate; strength training comprised of one set of 8-12 reps of eight to ten exercises at least twice per week.

Improving Health

The Center for Disease Control acknowledges inactivity as a major risk factor for heart disease by recommending that every adult needs to be physically active a minimum of 30 minutes each day. While we tend to interpret that to mean 30 minutes of "exercise" each day, the CDC is not that specific. It simply means, 30 minutes of movement activity - things as simple as gardening, housework, or grocery shopping qualify. The message is "people need to get up and get moving!"

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 102 sedentary women who walked three miles per day, five days per week for 24 weeks. The women were divided into four groups, (1) aerobic walkers; (2) brisk walkers; (3) strollers; and (4) sedentary controls. Fitness levels improved most in the faster walkers; however, HDL (good) cholesterol increased significantly in all walkers, regardless of how fast they walked or what level of fitness they achieved. The message here is when it comes to health, exercise frequency and consistency are more important than intensity.

Living the Difference

Health can be accomplished with much less exercise than what is needed to improve fitness.

Some of us are looking to maximize fitness gains while others are simply looking to improve health. Jazzercise will impact both your fitness and health status.

If you are new to exercise, try focusing on the health formula rather than the fitness formula. Success breeds exercise adherence, and adherence is necessary to the success of good health and fitness.

From the site formerly known as physical.com