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The 5 Components of Health-Related Physical Fitness | A Summary Overview

What’s up, friends? Today I am going over with you the five components of health-related fitness. This is something that I cover when I am going through fitness testing at my school. 

We talk about the different components as we test those components throughout the year with our fitness testing. Then we set goals for those various components of fitness and put some other actions into place to reach those goals by the end of the year. 

Cardiovascular Endurance.

So first up, let’s talk about the very first one, which is cardiovascular endurance. Many people shorten that out with a short word called cardio. So if you ever heard somebody say “cardio,” they’re talking about an activity that improves cardiovascular endurance. 

Your cardiovascular endurance is your heart’s and your lung’s ability to get oxygen from the air, put it into your blood, and keep your body moving. It’s how strong your heart and your lungs are. 

Your cardiovascular system helps you run, jog, swim, jump rope, and do many other aerobic activities where you’re losing your breath and getting tired. After all, you’re breathing hard because your heart and lungs work harder to get that oxygen from the air and put it into your blood; that is called cardiovascular endurance; a good example of this exercise is the fitness gram pacer test.

Muscular Strength

The next component I want to talk to you about is muscular strength. Muscular strength is the ability of your muscles to perform one rep of activity with the maximum force they can. Let’s take, for example, a vertical jump test. 

If we did a vertical jump test, you would jump as high as possible, and then I would measure to see how high you jump. So that would tell me the muscular strength in your legs because it’s the maximum amount of effort you can do once. 

Or if we loaded up some weights and did a squat or a bench press, it was the maximum amount of weight you could do at once. So that would be your muscular strength for that muscle group we are focused on. 

So muscular strength is the maximum force your muscles can exert in one repetition. And then we have muscular endurance.

Muscular Endurance

These two get mixed up. Muscular endurance is how many you can do. So, muscular endurance is your body’s ability, your muscle’s ability to do something over and over repeatedly.

So when we do the curl-up or push-up tests, those are examples of a muscular endurance test, testing how many times you can do something repeatedly. 

The way I like to remember muscular strength is how much you can do. Muscular endurance is how many you can do. Muscular strength is how much you can do at once. Muscular endurance is how many you can do over and over again. So you see the difference between those two things. 

Now, are they related? Of course. People that are strong, many times, will also have good muscular endurance. People that have good muscular endurance are also likely strong. So they’re two related things because you’re both focusing on your muscles. 

But I want to know the difference between those two things. 

Flexibility

Then next up is flexibility. Flexibility is your body’s ability to stretch and move the range of motion in your joints. So if you’re standing up straight, you reach down and try to touch your toes; that will show you one example of how flexible your legs and lower back are. 

Flexibility is important because it helps you reduce injuries, makes you a better athlete, and allows you to move and be more comfortable as you move in different ways.

But the more flexible you are, the less chance you have of getting injured, which is why many times when you go to a sports game, you’ll see athletes warming up and stretching their bodies out to try to increase their flexibility and get warmed up so that they’re not going to injure themselves during the game that they’re playing. 

We want to improve and maintain our flexibility. Flexibility is the amount of movement that your different ranges of motion that your other joints have, how much you can stretch and move. 

Some great activities for flexibility are, of course, stretching. But then activities like yoga or dance or gymnastics, all those activities are great to try to improve your flexibility through doing more slow movements that are controlled and stretching your body in different ways. 

The test that I use at my school to measure flexibility is the sit-and-reach test. That’s a way to measure your lower back and legs’ flexibility. 

Body Composition

The next thing we’re going to talk about is body composition. Body composition refers to what your body is made up of—the amount of fat, muscle, and lean tissue in your body. The most common way to measure that is by height and weight. 

Although that’s not the most accurate, there are many different ways to measure it, but most schools have a limited amount of fancy equipment, so they’re going to go with height and weight. 

Numerous variables, they include the diet and nutrition you consume, the amount of activity you engage in each day, and even the amount of sleep you get can affect your body composition. 

Excellent sleep allows your body to reset, recover, and stay healthy. And so that can also contribute to having a better body composition. So a quick review. 

We did five components of health-related fitness:

  1. First, we have cardiovascular endurance, which is how strong our heart and lungs are. 
  2. Second, we have muscular strength, how much you can do at once, and your muscles inserting a maximum force. 
  3. Third, we have muscular endurance, doing something over and over again. 
  4. Fourth, we have flexibility, your body’s ability to stretch and move and have a good range of motion at your joints, 
  5. Fifth, we have body composition, what your body is made up of, and we want to control that with exercise, eating healthy, and getting good sleep.

Those are the five components of health-related fitness, you guys. That was a good summary and overview for you. I hope you have a better understanding of it now, and I hope you have a great day. Catch you later. Have a good one.

George N.