30
Jul
What is Fitness?
When CrossFit Co-Founder & CEO Greg Glassman went looking for a definition of fitness, the best he could find was ; the ability to transmit genes and be healthy.
Although that definition certainly describes the word in a reproductive sense, what we are looking for is a way to define who can do more work.
Glassman came up with the idea that fitness was best described as; Increased work capacity, across broad time and modal domains.
This simply means, the ability to do work, in any given time domain, regardless of the task. This covers tasks that take several seconds (Olympics Lifts & Power Lifts) as well as long hikes. Whatever the task, we want to be able to perform it as fast as possible.
Ten General Physical Skills
There are ten, general, physical skills that one must work on in order to do well at any given task. They are;
1. Cardiovascular/Cardio Respiratory Endurance
2. Stamina
3. Strength
4. Flexibility
5. Power
6. Speed
7. Coordination
8. Accuracy
9. Agility
10. Balance
The Hopper Model
Think of a big lottery hopper- write a bunch of tasks on slips of paper, that cover all time domains and as many modalities as possible, throw them in. Whoever finishes averagely best at these activities is fittest.
That means that if you can lift a car, but can’t walk a flight of stairs, you aren’t fit. Same goes for the marathon runner who can’t even do a pull-up or deadlift his bodyweight.
Looking at the above 10 GPS- we are saying you are as fit as you are competent in each of these ten general physical skills. If you have a weakness in one, it will impact all the others.
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