Physical Fitness and Wellness
This domain tests the components of physical fitness, the difference between fitness and wellness, the FITT principle, and common fitness tests. Expect questions that ask you to design a safe exercise plan or interpret a test result.
Components and principles
- Health-related fitness: cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility and body composition.
- Skill-related fitness: speed, agility, balance, coordination, power and reaction time.
- FITT: Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type. A safe plan also uses progression, overload, specificity, recovery and individual differences.
- Wellness: a broader state of positive health that includes physical, mental, emotional, social, intellectual, occupational and environmental dimensions.
- Common tests: 50 m sprint for speed, 600 m run/walk for endurance, sit-ups for muscular endurance, sit-and-reach for flexibility, shuttle run for agility, and BMI for body-composition screening.
Worked example
A 15-year-old wants to improve cardiorespiratory endurance for the 600 m run. Using FITT: frequency 3–5 days a week; intensity moderate, judged by breathing harder but still able to speak short sentences; time 20–30 minutes of continuous or interval running; type running, cycling or brisk walking. Progress by about 10% per week and include easy days. The reasoning is that endurance improves when the heart and lungs are overloaded regularly, but recovery prevents injury and overtraining.
Marks-losing traps
Do not mix health-related and skill-related components. Do not say fitness and wellness are identical; wellness is wider. Do not use BMI as a direct measure of body fat. Do not judge fitness by appearance alone.