Sports and Fitness Equipment

Health, fitness and performance are three separate and poorly correlated phenomena.

Health is generally defined as the freedom from disease.

Fitness strictly relates to your ability to meet the demands of your environment.

Performance is how well you accomplish a task.

You can be healthy without being fit. You can be in poor health and perform superbly. Sick athletes break records all the time. Every Olympic competition is populated by athletes with colds, fevers, infections and diarrhoea. They invariably compete, and perform to their level.

The idea that sports make you healthy is a shibboleth. Sports can actually hurt you. Equipment They're not unhealthy per se, but they can be.

You don't have to be fit to be healthy. If health is defined as lack of disease, then fitness is not health. Only when your definition of health includes functional wellness - meaning the ability to cope with your environment - do health, fitness and performance coincide. Equipment

treadmill, treadmills, exercise bike, treadmill running machine, exercise bikes

I was at a faculty picnic a few years back, swimming with a colleague of mine, John Sellwood. He was dying of lung cancer. One lung had been removed; the other was infected. He was to go into the hospital the next day. Both of us had been college swimmers. We'd been swimming for a while when he said, I'll race you fifty yards.'

'You've already given me my handicap,' I said, and thought it gave me an unfair advantage. We started off even. I didn't deliberately let him beat me, but he did. The next day he entered the hospital, and a month later he was dead. I can think of no better illustration of the lack of correlation between health and performance.

Fitness means the development of components - muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance and flexibility.

Suppose I go to a gym and develop all these components. Am I going to swim or ski or play basketball better? Probably not. Supposing I just played basketball or skied or swam.

If my objective is to play a sport better, I would do better to play that sport. If I go swimming, play basketball or ski, I improve my performance in that sport - but it may make only a negligible contribution to my general muscular and cardio-respiratory fitness.