Is YOUR FITNESS DESTROYING YOUR HEALTH?

It might sound odd, but the idea of fitness doesn’t have a clear definition.

Many of us talk about fitness without really understanding what it means. Neither the fitness industry—like gyms or personal trainers—nor the medical field offers a clear definition of it.

The same issue comes up with the word “health.”

We’ve always tried to define health, but were surprised to find out that both terms, health and fitness, are often used a lot in gyms, by personal trainers, in medicine, and by online influencers without any universal agreement on what they mean.

People usually talk about health and fitness as if they’re connected. There’s a common belief that if your physical fitness improves, your health will improve too.

However, there’s no direct scientific proof linking these two things together.

The human body is always active and changing. It’s constantly balancing the process of breaking down (called catabolic) and building up (called anabolic).

This happens in your blood clotting system, for example.

Your body keeps making and breaking down blood clots to keep your blood flowing smoothly without causing any blockages in your arteries.

Your body also keeps adjusting other things like your pH balance, blood gases, hormone levels, electrolytes, and fluid levels. These changes happen through these catabolic and anabolic processes.

Our health depends on the right balance between these two states—catabolic and anabolic. To understand this, we define catabolic as anything that breaks down the body and anabolic as anything that helps grow the body.

Looking back to when humans were hunter-gatherers, there were times when food shortage was a real problem, causing a catabolic state. Although this sounds bad, studies show that during these times, a lot of DNA repair happens.

This tells us that a catabolic state is an essential part of health, not something to avoid. Knowing this, we should include both catabolic and anabolic processes in any definition of health we come up with.

Health can be thought of as being free from disease and maintaining a balance between breaking down and building up in the body.

Given the lack of a clear definition from the fitness and medical worlds, I suggest defining health as a physical state where there is no disease, and the body keeps a balance between catabolic and anabolic states.

Fitness is the condition of being physically able to handle activities that are more demanding than just sitting or slow walking.

So, the question we should ask is: What is exercise?

To fully understand how exercise, fitness, and health are connected, we need to know what exercise really is, not just any physical activity.

The key difference is that exercise is a specific activity aimed at making the body adapt in a positive way to improve fitness and health.

While general physical activity has the potential to cause some positive changes in fitness and health, it can also have negative effects.

Here's our definition of exercise based on what we know:

Exercise is an activity that leads to positive changes in the body, enhancing fitness and health without causing harm during the improvement process.

There are thousands of activities that people think of as exercise, from walking and running to doing calisthenics, lifting weights, and practicing yoga.

However, many of these activities don't meet our definition of exercise because they don't effectively cause the body to adapt in a way that significantly benefits fitness or health. Some activities might even harm the body if done continuously.

For this reason, we need to exclude activities like jogging and running from being considered true exercise.

This may be disappointing, especially for those who enjoy these activities, but choosing running as your main form of exercise is risky.

Studies have found that 60% of runners get injured in an average year, with one injury happening for every 100 hours of running.

The damage from running often shows up after 15 to 20 years, such as when runners who started in their early adulthood reach their 40s or 50s and then struggle with knee pain when climbing stairs or shoulder pain from bone spurs when lifting their arms.

These are gradual issues that arise from doing activities that are too strenuous and too frequent, preventing the body from maintaining a balance between breaking down and building up.

Even mild activities can be problematic.

For example, playing tennis for many years can lead to osteoarthritis from the thousands of repetitive movements of the shoulder and elbow, even though the weight of a tennis racket is light.

Any highly repetitive activity can cause wear and tear that eventually overwhelms the body's ability to heal and repair itself.

These types of activities, if done too often, tend to cause problems much sooner.

When we reviewed the research, we not only found a lack of clear definitions for fitness and health, but also, surprisingly, only a weak link between exercise and health.

Many people think athletes are healthy because they are fit.

However, looking at professional athletes, you'll find that while they have extremely high levels of fitness, the methods they use to achieve this often do not support their health.

Most world-class athletes do not reach their level of performance in a way that promotes health.

And this is simply because it's not possible to do so.

So many people don't understand the relationship between anabolic (building up) and catabolic (breaking down) processes, or that the pursuit of fitness can actually lead to negative health outcomes. Most still link fitness and exercise directly with health.

Instead of seeing health as a delicate balance of opposing yet related processes, they view it as a broad continuum where you can keep getting "better."

They assume that more health is always better, rather than understanding health as simply the absence of disease.

In reality, fitness and health aren't directly linked; as one increases, the other doesn't necessarily follow.

With the right exercise methods, health and fitness can track together to some extent. However, random physical activities can create a situation where fitness levels might rise, but health actually declines.

Looking back to our ancestors, they needed to expend energy to acquire energy—this was their way of obtaining food and shelter. Their survival required a minimal level of activity with bursts of intense muscular exertion.

They maintained a balance between the catabolic state, a byproduct of exertion needed to survive, and the anabolic state, allowing them to rest and recover the energy needed for their next activities.

Fast forward to today, we face the opposite problem with an abundance of food and labor-saving technology. This means we don't need to expend much energy to get nourishment, leading to health compromises opposite to those faced by endurance athletes.

Today, a significant portion of the population engages in such low-intensity physical activity that it doesn't meaningfully trigger catabolic processes.

There's no mechanism driving physiological adaptations for health or fitness. The assumption that physical activity alone enhances health is fundamentally flawed. Any health benefits typically arise only because our activity levels are so much lower than those of our ancestors that even a slight increase can seem beneficial.

Raising effort from a sedentary state to something closer to what our ancestors experienced is not an optimal path to health.

People like to think there's a constant, linear relationship between fitness and health. It’s like a person measuring water levels at the beach. He measures at low tide and again as the tide rises, concluding incorrectly from the rapid change that the entire continent will soon be underwater. This illustrates the error in assuming that more activity always correlates with better health. Health improves, but only to a normal physiological baseline.

Studies on overly active groups, like endurance or cross-training athletes, show that pushing physical activity to the limit often compromises health and may shorten life spans.

The good news is, science now better understands how we adapt and recover. This knowledge allows for exercise that achieves exceptional fitness levels without harming health, and in many ways, it can enhance health.

This scientific understanding focuses on the exercise variables of volume, intensity, and frequency. Applied correctly, these can lead to superior fitness while maximizing health.

As we age, we naturally want to live longer. In this quest, we often link life with health, and health with fitness.

It’s tempting to look back to when we were younger, perhaps around age 18, when we were active and at peak fitness and health, and think something we did then enhanced our well-being.

However, it’s essential to recognize that until about age 25, our bodies naturally got stronger each year due to growth processes. In the future, as lifespans potentially extend well into the 100s, the challenge will be to maintain functionality and health.

To do this, we must learn to exercise in a way that fosters positive changes without the wear and tear associated with modern approaches to fitness. Our goal should shift from enduring as much exercise as possible to requiring precisely enough to foster beneficial fitness qualities, thereby improving our chances for better health and longer life.

This is our mission, and I'm glad you're on this journey with us.

I'm Allen Branch from Fitness One Training Systems.

Till next time.