Do this and become fit, do that and you will be fitter. Wait, what do these types of fitness mean? More importantly, which type of fitness are you working towards? Read on to find out!
1. Aesthetic Fitness
Aesthetic fitness is probably the most common type of fitness pursued by many of us on this fitness journey.
To our ladies, aesthetic fitness is not just looking fine with no waistline in a bikini. This is because if you were to look at ten fitness influencers, you will find that some are more skinny, others are muscular and some of them do carry some abdominal fat too. What do they have in common? They exercise, they are confident and they wear sports attire! So, ladies, you can do these too! Take care of your bodies, and own your look!
To the fellas out there, the aesthetic guy is, unfortunately, a fixed stereotype. The guy with a well-defined set of abs, and muscles that are well defined. This means maintaining a low body fat, which can be really hard for some of us to do! Our advice, try T-Shirt Fitness instead! The formula for T-Shirt fitness is a muscular upper body, and a relatively smaller waist, and bam you look fantastic in a shirt, and most of us are fully clothed most of the time anyway!
2. Strength Fitness
Well, this is another form of fitness. While you are at the gym or looking at people moving furniture in general, strength performance is a form of fitness too. Look at Eddie Hall's physique the day he lifted half a ton off the ground, he might not be the most aesthetic, but I do not think anyone will say that he is unfit!
3. Cardiovascular Fitness
These guys look like your average joe, they look like your neighbour, the look like your nephew. When they run, they look fit. The ability of the marathoners to run such long distances so fast is truly remarkable, no one can say that someone running a full marathon in two hours is not fit. Yet, this legend might to look the fittest or might not even be able to lift heavier weights than the average person!
4. Sport Fitness
He shoots three-pointers and is the team's star player. He might not look the fittest, he might not run the furthest or jump the highest. When you look at him on the court, no one can deny that he is fit.
5. General Fitness
The most important one we often miss out in chasing our goals is general fitness. The absence of serious or disabling medical conditions, being about to do our daily activities, is perhaps the so basic we often forget about this. Yet, in our pursuits of lifting really heavy weights or crash dieting, unfortunately some of us get injured and fall ill, and might at time be less fit than this gentleman. At the end of the day, fitness is a lifestyle, so in our pursuit of fitness, let us not forget this really important type of fitness, to not take it for granted, and to keep ourselves generally fit because we will be in this bodies for quite a long period of time!
In Summary
What we really want to highlight here, is that this concept of fitness is so broad, it gets confusing sometimes. When we say we want to get fit, it is important we be clear which is the most important to us! Fitness does have a huge overlap. Wanting to lose fat and gain muscle does require general, cardiovascular and strength fitness. Yet, as long as we keep our goals in sight, we will achieve these goals. The worse pitfall is perhaps overtraining to the point of injury, or starting out with wanting to look good yet end up chasing the next weight lifting record causing us to become giants.
As we focus on the type of fitness we want and work towards it and become just a little closer to our fitness goal, we will achieve and exceed our goal.
What is your fitness goal?