Many people have a vision of what the word fitness means. With so many advertisements and promises of a physically fit body, it can become difficult to determine and define what fitness is. It’s definitely a multi-million dollar per year industry, but sadly many Americans don’t know what it means to truly be fit.

Different people have different definitions and limitations on what fitness means. For example, a long distance or marathon runner might define it as having a strong lung capacity and good leg muscles. A bodybuilder or a weight lifter may say that fitness is in how many pounds one can bench press, or the amount of muscle mass one has. The reality is that fitness is determined by each individual person’s definition of what fitness truly is for them and their needs.

True physical fitness is the ability to have endurance, strength, flexibility, and stamina all in one. It also includes speed and balance. While no one will be perfect in all of these areas, just being able to maintain them all at a reasonable level is sufficient to be deemed physically fit.

Some athletes excel in certain areas, while they might fall back on others. But they should be able to at least perform all skill sets in a minimal way without too much difficulty. This is the real definition of someone who is fit. The ability to perform all of these physical tasks in a way that a person can go from one thing to another without any problems is considered fit.

For the “average Joe,” physical fitness might not be as easy as it sounds. It takes hard work and determination to get someone’s stamina, speed, and muscle capacity up to par. Training on a daily, if not weekly basis can help tone someone’s body and get it trained into a working machine that will be able to run, jump, throw, and stretch much further than ever before. Come up with a plan and a program that will be easy to perform, and then expect to increase the difficulty as time goes by.

If you don’t notice a change within the first few months, your fitness plan may need to be revised. With time and patience, anyone can be fit and healthy. You do not have to be an Olympic swimmer or a famous football player to be physically fit and able to perform physically challenging tasks. Training the body to work harder and smarter is something anyone can do, and the rewards are amazing.

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Gaining muscle can be difficult once you have hit a plateau, this is a state where no matter what you seem to be doing you are not getting any stronger and therefore you are not gaining any muscle. This is something that really sucks and I will try to address this is three different posts. First I will deal with your sets themselves, secondly deal with your workouts and thirdly deal with the stuff going on outside the gym.

So what can you do to gain muscle and break through the plateau? Shock your muscles in entirely new ways! There are a few ways within your sets. One thing to remember when you are doing sets is the intensity of the set itself.

Your muscles are very rarely using more than a few percent of the total number of muscle fibers to do an activity. Think of how your muscles are going to work if you are doing a marathon compared to how your muscles are going to work when you are running a 100 meter sprint, a big difference.

What we want to do when lifting weights is to push our muscle fibers all as hard as possible and use as many as possible. You will likely be more interested in having legs like a sprinter not legs like a marathon runner. A sprinter uses lots of muscle fibers per step, as many as possible while a marathon runner is using very few and the muscle alternates using them so that the person can run for a far longer time. simplistic example, but hey it works! Read the rest of this entry »