The Four Types Of Physical Fitness

You know what physical fitness is. Or, do you? Did you know that there are four basic types of fitness exercise? One or more of these should be added to your day-to-day regimen to improve or maintain your overall health. Everyone knows what it means to exercise. You probably do some exercising yourself. But there are four basic types of fitness achievement all of which are important to the major systems in the body. Here they are:

• Aerobic Exercise
• Anaerobic Exercise
• Muscular Endurance
• Joint Flexibility

As you can see, these break down the generality of fitness into some basic categories all of which contribute to health but which focus on very different parts or systems of the body. Aerobic fitness involves raising your heart rate and increasing your oxygen intake. You know this type well. When you jog or swim, you are doing it. When you do any workout that gets your heart rate up and increases your breathing, you are doing aerobic activity. This is important because it opens up the blood vessels, so the blood circulates more freely. It keeps clots from forming. It also increases your respiratory rate. This improves the amount of oxygen that gets into your lungs and your brain. Oxygen is essential to overall health for a number of reasons. Anaerobic exercise is the opposite of that listed above. This is where you work out and stop. The heart rate decreases for a time and causes your muscle to workout in what is considered an oxygen deprived state. If you play football or tennis, you are familiar with this type of exercise. You may run for a time, but then you get to rest. How does this help your body? It causes the body to produce sugar burners. What this does is make your body burn more fat and calories because you are pushing it more before it gets to rest. Anaerobic workouts also include weight training. Joint flexibility exercise is activity focused on moving the knees and elbows. You want to create motion so that you improve the flow of joint fluid in your body. This is good for preventing or combating forms of arthritis. It also makes it easier to move in comfort. Muscular endurance and strength building are another form of fitness. These are essential because you want to have as much strength as possible. The older you get, the more brittle your bones can be, so building up muscle helps counteract this. It also makes it possible to burn more fat when you are resting. Doing bench presses and vertical jumps are forms of muscular endurance activities. Weight training is also a form of strength building. Some people want to build muscle to be able to show it off, but you do not need to be a bodybuilder to get the benefits of muscle strengthening workouts. These are the four fitness types of exercise. Now that you know more about them individually, you can incorporate them in a balanced way to achieve overall good health.