Physical Fitness, Health, and Wellness
Separate the components before you train them
Fitness has two families of components. Health-related fitness includes cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition. Skill-related fitness includes agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, and speed. Questions frequently swap a member of one list into the other; a runner with great endurance is not thereby “agile,” and power is strength applied quickly, not endurance.
Training follows principles: overload, progression, specificity, reversibility, and recovery. The FITT formula-frequency, intensity, time, type-organizes prescription. For cardiorespiratory work, estimate maximum heart rate as 220 minus age and use 60–80% of that for moderate-to-vigorous training, but remember the estimate has individual error; pair it with the talk test or perceived exertion. Children and adolescents generally need about 60 minutes of daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, including muscle- and bone-strengthening activity on at least three days per week.
Assessment should be valid, reliable, and educational. Norm-referenced scores compare students with peers; criterion-referenced scores compare performance with a standard. Health-related fitness tests are screened, explained, and used to set personal goals-not to rank or embarrass students. Body composition measures such as BMI are screening tools with limitations, not diagnoses.
Worked example: a 15-year-old’s estimated maximum heart rate is 220 − 15 = 205 bpm; 60–80% is about 123–164 bpm. Because the formula can be off by 10–12 bpm, confirm with perceived exertion and the talk test.