So what does fitness actually mean ?

We could start by saying that fitness is defined as "the ability to perform physical activity."

This description goes beyond, beyond being able to life a lot of weights at the gym or being able to run long distances.

Fitness has important features; that we need to know about to understand the meaning of fitness even a bit more. 

So the five main features or components of fitness include:

1.     Cardiorespiratory endurance

The meaning of Cardiorespiratory endurance is how are bodies are able to supple power during any physical activity through the bodies circulatory and respiratory systems. The Cardiorespiratory endurance has two parts. The first part is how efficient your heart and lungs are delivering oxygen to all your body and the second part is creating energy that your muscles might need in order to contract. Activities that help improve cardiorespiratory endurance are activities like jogging, swimming, cycling or just walking.

The second component is:

    2.   Muscular strength

Muscular strength is the ability of muscles to exert any force during an activity. One can strengthen his/her muscle by making "resistance training", training the muscle to work against resistance. A muscle must be stuffed to be strengthened and this can only be done by lifting weights. 

The third component is:

   3.   Muscular endurance 

It is the ability of a muscle of a muscle to exert much force without it tiring out. Muscular endurance training also helps in developing the slow twitch fibre in your muscles. A small tip that I can add here is that this muscle endurance can be improved by cardiorespiratory activities as I mentioned above.

The forth component is:

  4. Body composition 

It is the comparative amounts of muscle, bone and fat; these are the elements that make up the body composition. Even though someone's weight might not be changing, this does not have to mean that their level of fat is still remaining the same. One must understand that people with high muscle ratio weight more than those of the same height and waist size but have less muscle. 

The fifth and last component:

 5. Flexibility 

Flexibility is the most important component of all the five. It is the choice of movement across a joint and it improves the ability to link movements together so it might as well help avoid injuries. 

There are different types of Flexibility:

• Dynamic flexibility (dynamic or active movements of the muscles)
• Static-Active flexibility (extra flexibility of the muscles)
• Static-Passive flexibility (passive flexibility of the muscles)

To improve your flexibility try stretching in activities that lengthen the muscle such as swimming.