The following is an article that was born from series of posts that I shared on my Instagram story.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it seemed to resonate with a lot of people and I had numerous texts and DM’s from both clients and non-clients alike who had found some value in what I said.

Nothing I outlined would be considered revolutionary or ingenious by any stretch of the imagination, however it seemed to help many conceptualise both the similarities and differences between health and fitness.

I will state this now though, this is by no means an extensive article on health. I am open to writing a series of articles on differing components of health if there is an audience who would be interested in that, however this article is just the result of a series of simple, short thoughts, as that is more appropriate to communicating information across social media.

If you are interested in seeing more of my thoughts regarding all aspects health and fitness, then you are welcome to follow me @hot_and_dongerous on Instagram.

Yep! That’s not a joke.

That’s my username and I’m not changing it… I’ll get on with the article now…

“FIT” AND/OR “HEALTHY”

Health and fitness are often used synonymously, yet they are divergent in many capacities.

While conclusively defining either can be somewhat problematic, as different branches of healthcare definite then slightly differently, in a very distilled down sense, they equate to the following:

Health: The absence of disease/injury.

Fitness: The condition of being capable to perform a specific task.

An analogy for these two things that I use in presentations or with clients is; Health is like juggling. Each ball represents a different system/component of health and you must keep all of them off the ground in order to remain healthy. Dropping one would result in illness, injury, sickness or psychological issues etc.

Fitness is prioritising one or a few of the balls. Each ball still represents a differing system, but you begin to focus more so on particular balls, throwing them higher and ensuring they don’t drop.

While it’s true that and fitness can be maintained/improved simultaneously, at certain point, they begin to impact on one another, such as gains in fitness come at the expense of health, or improving health means lowered or limited fitness.

To go back to the juggling analogy, imagine you have a red, a green and a blue ball. You want to improve your “fitness” specific to the green ball. So you focus more and more on this ball, throwing it higher and higher.

At a certain point, you’ve reached the maximum height you can throw this ball, in regular underhanded juggling manner. You could throw it higher, but you’d need to reposition your body and throw it overhand, straight up in the air.

The act of doing this in this while still juggling the red and blue balls becomes increasingly difficult, and putting as much effort into throwing the red ball will very likely result in you dropping either or both of the others.

While simplistic, this analogy holds true in almost every regard.

When you prioritise a fitness endeavour, your health may very well suffer, and you might “drop your balls”. However, just as this analogy illustrates, you can always pick your balls up again, and keep on juggling, regaining health and setting yourself up for another run at fitness in the future.

While it’s somewhat true that “your health is all that you have”, your health is also rather pliable and malleable. It is possible to very “healthy” in the long term, while still spending periods of being “unhealthy” in the short term.

This is exemplified in SOME physique competitors. For those who are unaware (which many are not), physique athletes are typically a far stretch from being in “optimal health” when they step on stage.