What Is Fitness?

Elite Fitness in 100 Words
“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.” – Greg Glassman, Founder of CrossFit

In the age of technology figuring out a safe, effective, and fun workout regimen can be overwhelming and confusing due to the wealth of information and misinformation that constantly bombards us through the internet, tv, and the press. Figuring out exactly what exactly fitness is can be a difficult task. Having an actual definition of fitness gives us a measuring stick by which to judge progress and track results.

Fitness is defined for our purposes as work capacity across broad time and modal domains. This means simply that fitness is based upon an individual’s ability to do work in the physical world. In our workouts we perform constantly varied, functional motions, at a high intensity with the goal of increasing our ability to do work. For this reason we do not chase numbers on a scale, reflections in the mirror, body fat percentages, or VO2 maxes as they are merely correlates to fitness, not fitness itself.

Read More: What is Fitness? From the CrossFit Journal