There Is A Method to the Madness
This is a podcast where I will be discussing all aspects of physical fitness. I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer and owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs for the last 25 years. My passion is health and fitness and I am excited to share my views, some stories, interviews and much more with you.
There Is A Method to the Madness
Fitness Myth Busting: Your Skinny Friend May Not Be Healthier Than You
Welcome to there is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell and I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I am the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and, most importantly, why things work. Hence the name. There is a method to the madness.
Speaker 1:Before I get to today's show, I want to thank Jonathan and Lynn Gildan of the Gildan Group at Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home sales. Why don't you give them a shout and figure out what your home is worth? 386-451-2412. I have a question for you Are you fit?
Speaker 1:Are you physically fit, and if so, how? How are you physically fit? Why are you physically fit? Are there areas you are not physically fit?
Speaker 1:Let's talk just a little bit about that today. So what do you think of when you think of physically fit? The most common thing people think of is thin, skinny. I mean, that's great. Thin is. I don't know if skinny is, but sure that's a component to physical fitness. That component is called body composition. But that's just one area of fitness. It's an important one, but so is flexibility, so is muscular strength, so is muscular endurance and so is cardiorespiratory fitness. They all make up what are called the five health components to physical fitness, and they are all equally important. I mean, maybe we can put some more weight on cardiovascular, because, yes, you have to have a strong heart for sure. Body composition, because being obese can lead to a lot of different age-related and fitness-related and other types of chronic diseases. I shouldn't say age-related, that's really not true, but fitness-related chronic diseases. Muscular strength, because it leads to hypertrophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean they're all important and you know, maybe you are going to rank some of them higher than others, but I can tell you that they're all important.
Speaker 1:By the end of this podcast, I want you to at least change how you view fitness or maybe you've already seen it for what it is, that fitness is a balance of all of those components. But I don't want you to think of just being thin as fit. Times are a changing, as they say, and that is a good thing. So we're starting to see more and more people understanding that. I mean, if we go back to the 1970s, probably before that, probably before that, but maybe up into the 70s and 80s I mean all, I should say, the magazines and all of the movie stars and all that. You know that was just about being thin and everybody thought of fitness as being thin, being skinny. I mean, nowadays there's enough good information out there that shows that that is just not always true. It's not necessarily true. So times are changing, but I will say they do need to change a little bit more, because I do think that out of the five you know, people would still put body composition as like two and a half of them, and then everything else adding up to the middle, which just isn't true. I mean, they're all important, so let me repeat them again.
Speaker 1:We got body composition, and body composition is the difference between fat mass and lean mass, so it's not just weight. I mean weight doesn't matter a whole lot. I mean, I know the BMI, which is body mass index a lot of physicians use, but you know the good ones will tell you that there's a lot more to the story than that as well, because BMI is nothing more than height and weight into an equation. It's yeah, I don't even want to say it's good, it's okay, but like body composition means a lot more. Like, what are those pounds on your body. Are you mostly muscle or are you mostly fat? Well, that's body composition. We want mostly muscle. That's what body composition is. That would be ideal to be more muscle than fat, of course.
Speaker 1:Then there's cardiorespiratory fitness, and that is the ability for your heart and lungs to produce oxygen at the rate at which you need it. Produce oxygen at the rate at which you need it, so the more oxygen that can be produced when you need it is the mark of a good cardiorespiratory system. That is very important. Let's say you're thin but you don't exercise, and then all of a sudden you're climbing the stairs, you're out of breath. Well, you're not fit, you don't have a fit cardiorespiratory system. And I've known plenty of people, due to genetics and other lifestyle things, that aren't necessarily thin to the eye but, man, their cardiovascular system is super fit. So you cannot judge a book by its cover and you can't say, well, they're not as good as that person who's thin over there. I mean, that is just not true.
Speaker 1:All right, remember the goal of this podcast. You will leave it feeling, or an understanding that all of them are equal. And what do you need to work on? Then? We have muscular strength Now, in the pure definition of it, it it's the ability to move a load one time, like that's the pure definition. But really I think we know what strength is it's the ability to do work. It's the ability of your muscles to move things, and that is very, very important.
Speaker 1:Here's another example we see quite often that's not correct. People will see runners out running and that is awesome, and they might be thin and they're running and they look like they're running at a good clip from what you can see. So your automatic assumption is they're fit. Well, yeah, probably at least two out of the five categories. They might be, and they might be five out of five. But what I'm trying to get you to understand is we don't know that just based on appearance. But what if they can't do a single push-up? What if they get down onto the floor to attempt to stretch and they have trouble getting off the floor because of their mobility, their flexibility or their strength? What if everything creaks when they get out of a chair? They just don't have the strength and mobility. Well, they're not fit, and the problem with that is that's very precarious because eventually they're not going to be able to run if they don't take care of that skeleton. If they don't make their muscles and joints stronger, they're not going to be able to do what they like to do. So they're only fit to an extent, all right.
Speaker 1:Then we have muscular endurance. It's very similar to muscular strength. It is very hard to divide these two, so oftentimes we in my industry just call it muscular fitness. But the difference is, with muscular endurance it's the ability to do a load over and over again. Do your muscles ache when you stand in line? That's muscular endurance.
Speaker 1:Do you go to a theme park and not only are you fatigued generally speaking, systemically speaking, but your leg muscles are fatigued because you've been walking around all day. That's muscular endurance. Do you cut the grass with a good push mower, which I know? I have some clients that still do, and I do, by the way. I think it's great exercise. But are your forearms screaming at you by the end of mowing? That's muscular endurance. In the gym, like that would be tested with how many pull-ups you can do, that would also be strength, how many push-ups you can do. So, as you see, strength and endurance are closely related to each other. But we have to have that I mean, think your activities, a daily living. If your legs get tired just from standing around or just walking back and forth going shopping, you're not fit. So that's very important to work on.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, our fifth health component is flexibility, and flexibility basically is the ability to move a joint through a pain-free full range of motion. Now that one is one that I'm currently working on making a priority, because it hasn't been a priority. I've always been reasonably flexible and, as I say to clients sometimes I have to point out myself I'll say that good or average is the enemy of good or great, because if I'm decent, I'm not going to work at it. That's not good, because I wasn't great by any means. Out of all five, it was probably the least of my priorities, and you know we reap what we sow. So the least of my fitness would be flexibility as well, and I've noticed it more and more. I can look at pictures of me running and I'm not lifting my feet and that has a lot to do with tight quads not recovering as good. So, and plus just testing it, just doing different flexibility exercises and understanding that I've lost some flexibility. So I've made it a priority because we want our joints to move crisply, I believe.
Speaker 1:Right, that gets back to getting out of the chair example I used. Part of that is strength and part of that is flexibility. Now we don't have to be elite at any of these to be fit. We just have to be fit, we just have to be competent, we just have to be good. And it is far more important to be generally fit all the way around than be elite at one or two of them only, to the demise of the others. I promise you that it is more important.
Speaker 1:You know, the military has always done a good job with that. They want fit soldiers, right? I mean, I think you could imagine why, but they want fit soldiers. They've always been good at stressing cardio because they run, they march, they walk, they ruck. They focus on strength by doing a lot of different calisthenic type exercises strength and endurance by doing push-ups and squats and pull-ups and sit-ups and those types of things and the modern day grouping that they'll have in there. There also is some strength training, but they do a lot of calisthenic type bodyweight exercises. They do a lot of flexibility, stretching after they work out and things, and that's part of their testing. That they do and they're expected to maintain a reasonable, not too skinny, weight. It's part of how they get like different points through boot camp and things like that, different types of tests they do. If you go to the academies like West Point or Naval Academy, it is all part of it and they balance it out really, really well.
Speaker 1:My goal is that you leave this thinking okay, so I need to work on a balanced fitness approach. I can't just go to the gym and lift weights. I mean, that's what a lot of people do. That's great. I think it's a good start. Shoot, I did that probably through the majority of my 20s, started doing cardio in my 30s.
Speaker 1:Some people just run and they think, oh, I'm fit and they don't go to the gym. No, we have to do all of it. Flexibility, honestly, even though it's a priority, is the easiest to get in. I mean, if we just stretch a little bit after our workouts and during our workouts, like that's what we'll have our clients do a stretch here and there is all it takes. But we still have to do it and attempt to do it correctly. Okay, so hit me up. Let me know what part of fitness do you need to work on? Thanks everybody for listening. I ask you to please hit subscribe or follow the show and also please hit automatic download. It really helps the show. Now let me thank Overhead Door of Daytona Beach. Let me tell you they sponsor this show along with the Golden Group at Realty Pros and they sponsor the MaxFit Games. We cannot appreciate these guys enough. They have the absolute best garage door company in the area. Please give them a shout at.
