Fitness vs Wellness vs Wellbeing

What is the Difference Between Fitness vs Wellness vs Wellbeing?

With mental health coming to the forefront in the last few years and science helping us understand that we need to look beyond fitness and start approaching our health from a "wholistic" approach. To de-stress from our busy lives and work towards being physically, mentally, and emotionally fit, we need to upgrade our exercise routines. This article will dive deeper into popular words such as fitness, wellness, and wellbeing. We will help you understand what these words mean and show you how they're all related.

Fitness

Fitness is defined as your ability to fulfill daily tasks with optimal quality, endurance, and strength with the management of disease, fatigue, and stress and reduce sedentary behavior. We will discuss fitness as it pertains to physical health and how it's commonly used to improve your general health. There are different components of fitness that make up our general understanding of a fit body.

Components of fitness:

• Muscular Strength: The ability to exert force against some form of resistance in a single effort or typically a short period.

• Muscular Endurance: The ability to continue exerting force over a prolonged time without getting tired.

• Cardiorespiratory Endurance: Commonly referred to as cardiovascular endurance, is the relationship between your heart (cardio) and lungs (respiratory). When measured, it shows how efficiently your cardiorespiratory system functions and indicates how physically fit and healthy you are. You have a lower resting heart rate when your heart and lungs work efficiently. You can recover quicker, as well as your ability to oxygenate your blood and expel carbon dioxide appropriately. Picture Mr. Myagi telling you to breathe in and out here.

• Flexibility: The ability of a joint or series of joints to move through an unrestricted, pain-free range of motion. Although flexibility varies from person to person, minimum ranges are necessary for maintaining joint and total body health.

• Body Composition: Your body's core components like fat, protein, minerals, and body water. It provides a better glimpse into your overall health than traditional methods like BMI & weight by accurately showing changes in fat mass, lean muscle mass, and body fat percentage.

Wellness

Wellness is an action-oriented practice that can lead to greater mental, emotional, and physical health. The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness as the active pursuit of activities, choices, and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health. Wellness can be achieved through healthy lifestyle habits like regular physical activity or yearly preventive health screenings. Consider nutritional consultations or programs to lose weight or stop drinking and smoking.

Notice the emphasis on health through actions, activities, and intent with wellness, which keeps the highlight on the physical being but, more importantly, expands it beyond your body, brain, breath, and movement. A multidimensional approach allows us to strive for personal harmony according to our views and priorities. Health is the predominant focus in wellness rather than happiness. Previously the research surrounding wellness included the behaviors and lifestyles that put people at premature risk of disease and death, such as smoking, inactivity, poor diet, and stress. To balance your wellness, you must implement self-regulation, self-awareness, habits, and strategies to help change your life.

• Self-regulation: Your ability to control your impulses and behavior to meet specific standards, goals, or ideals. This control of self-regulation is aligned with your own values. It requires mental energy, which is problematic because your brain is always looking to preserve energy, which may complicate things.

• Habits: Your ability to change a routine to a habit will significantly benefit you since it won't require more mental energy than having to focus on the task at hand. About 40% percent of your daily behavior comes from your habits, and this will ultimately play a significant role in what your future is going to look like. Establish healthy habits since unhealthy habits are tough to change and require a conscious thought beyond self-regulation to rewire your brain. So stay engaged with your FightCamp community to positively wire your brain to healthy, purposeful movement daily.

• Self-awareness: Start paying attention to what you're doing, when you change those little things, and how they affect your life. When you want to insert a new habit, consider how your other habits might affect your new routine. If you are a night owl and want to complete multiple rounds on the FightCamp app by waking up extra early, you might find it challenging to be motivated. You might want to get more sleep when you know how your short nights affect your commitment to fitness and health. Self-awareness also considers what kind of person you are, a night owl vs. an early bird, simple vs. complex, or impulsive vs. reserved.

• Strategies: Set yourself up for success through accountability, scheduling, and monitoring. Different ways to succeed come from making your strategies count for the short and long term, and once you have implemented those strategies for more than two months, your planned strategies become habits. Since new habits, on average, take 66 days to form, so stick with your path and engage with others in your community to benefit from improved health.

Wellbeing

Wellbeing is the combination of feeling good and functioning well; it is not focused on behaviors alone but rather on a state of being to how you perceive yourself and your life. Self-perception requires us to look inward and allows us to regulate our state of being when that is our focus. In particular, stress management through fitness (resistance training) has significantly improved anxiety symptoms. Understanding our body's signals helps us understand and regulate emotional and physical states," says Dr. Helen Weng at the University of California San Francisco.

You may exercise several times weekly, eat well, journal, and meditate before bed. But are you fulfilled? Do you feel mentally and physically strong? Are you satisfied with your relationships with others? And more importantly, are you happy with your relationship with yourself?

Health and wellbeing go hand-in-hand, as health is not the predominant factor of your wellbeing. Wellbeing considers the body, mind, and external influences such as your social connections, work situation, financial situation, and environmental interaction. The key to making this happen is your willingness to engage with the different dimensions of wellbeing beyond your physical fitness and health.

The Eight-Dimensional Windows to Wellbeing

Below are eight dimensions of wellbeing that you can start working on to create balanced harmony. Please note that they don't have to be equally balanced, but they all require attention and are interconnected.

• Physical: Personal care for your body to stay healthy, utilizing exercise, nutrition, sufficient sleep, and function optimally.

• Intellectual: Intellectual growth by staying curious, remaining a student to be a better teacher, and sharing your growing knowledge base and skillset.

• Emotional: Learning how to manage your emotions in a positive, constructive manner and appreciating other people's feelings. Understand and respect your feelings, values, and attitude.

• Social: Nurture healthy, caring, and intimate relationships while enjoying companionship. Stay involved with your community by contributing positively.

• Spiritual: Find purpose, value, and meaning in your own life without or with organized religion. Engage in activities that align with your beliefs and values.

• Career: Meaningful and rewarding participation in your work that provides personal satisfaction and life enrichment aligned with your values, goals, and lifestyle.

• Financial: Self-awareness to live within your means and make informed financial decisions while setting realistic short and long-term goals to provide for you and your family. The awareness that not everyone has the same monetary values, needs, and circumstances.

• Environmental: Demonstrate your commitment to a healthy planet and be aware of how your daily choices might contribute to the instability of the earth's ever-changing state of the physical environment.

The Wholistic Approach

Fitness, wellness, and wellbeing are all part of a “wholistic” approach to a life of health and longevity. If wellbeing is where we are going, think of wellness as how to get there. Wellness is a set of habits and behaviors, which includes fitness. Wellness is the state or quality of being healthy. Meanwhile, wellbeing is the state of being healthy, happy, or successful. Wellness plays a part in wellbeing, and a sense of wellbeing often generates more wellness habits since they are interconnected. Wellness focuses more on physical health, while wellbeing emphasizes mental and emotional health. Consider how wellness alone does not paint the complete picture as it focuses on what would harm you sooner instead of concentrating on longevity through wellbeing.

In conclusion, fitness, wellness, and wellbeing are all interconnected when you look at wellbeing as the whole and wellness as a part that includes fitness; then, you can start to work your way to a happier version of yourself. So continue to work on your fitness, incorporate the strategies for success from wellness and engage with your dimensions in a dynamic and personal way.

Train Like a Fighter

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