Physical Fitness: the condition of the body as a result of participating in exercises that promotes muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, cardiovascular endurance, and a positive body composition. Maintaining physical fitness is a lifelong process and should always be part of your life. As with all healthful actions, starting now helps you enjoy a more healthful life later on.

Muscular Strength: the amount of force the muscles can exert against resistance over a short period of time. (Resistance is something working against you such as gravity, weight, or lifting something. By using our muscles regularly they become stronger. Our muscles help us in lifting, jumping, turning, twisting, basically all of our daily activities. Muscular strength can help improve your daily activities and your performance in sports; as well as help maintain correct posture.)

Muscular Endurance: (endurance is being able to do something over time) So muscular endurance is the ability to use muscles for an extended period of time. Having good muscular endurance allows us to perform repeated movements without being tired and help maintain correct posture

Flexibility: having the ability to bend and move the joints through a range of motion. What is range of motion? ANS: being able to bend or stretch your body to a certain extent. It is different on each person depending on his/her flexibility and body make-up.

Examples of daily activities that need you to be flexible: Wrestling, gymnastics, dancing, picking up dropped objects, tying your shoes, any sport, etc.

Cardiovascular Endurance: the ability to pump blood through your heart and blood vessels efficiently for extended periods of time. Good cardiovascular endurance improves blood circulation throughout your body and strengthens your heart, which will help strengthen the muscles throughout your body (blood going to muscles helps them heal better when working out which in turn makes them stronger)

Why is a healthy heart important? ANS: decreases the chance of heart disease, perform better in all activities (sport, life, better circulation helps strengthen muscles).

Body Composition: make up of the body, comparing the amount of muscle to fat. In general, you want more muscle than fat. How can we do this? ANS: exercise, watch our diet.

Warming up causes the muscle temperature to rise which actually "warms" it up. Why should you always warm up before doing any type of physical activity? Muscles get loosened and warmed which decreases chance of injury, can increase range of motion, which allows for more efficient exercising; muscles are like rubber bands. The more warmed up they are, the more they stretch and have a lesser chance of tearing or breaking. Warming up is also a much more comfortable way to start an activity as opposed to going into it right away. What are some good ways to warm up muscles before starting an activity? ANS: walking, jogging, bicycling, and then stretching; it is good to start a warm-up slowly and then gradually increase the intensity.

Cool-down Why is it so important? ANS: a quick stop of hard activity can cause blood to pool in the legs, leading to fainting and sometimes heart problems; also reduces muscle soreness and tightness the next day or next time of activity. What are some good cool down activities? ANS: slow walking, slow jog, slow pedaling on a bike, basically continuing the activity at a slower rate, and then stretching.

Specificity examples: biceps curls to improve biceps strength and endurance depending on weight and reps, cardiovascular endurance by distance running, bicycling, walking, etc.

Overload example: A distance runner may practice overloading by running longer distances or if the runner wanted to work on speed the runner would do more sprints at a faster pace. This also uses specificity because the runner is choosing a specific area to focus on and then the runner overloads that area. In order to improve any aspect of fitness you must continually increase the demands put on the body system you are trying to improve. If you don’t increase the demands you will keep that level, but you will not get better. Ask students for other examples of overloading in various activities.

Progression: No new benefit will be gained from performing an activity at the same level all the time. Intensity and time must be increased for improvement. Why must you be careful when progressing in an activity? ANS: attempting too much too soon often results in injury, or at least stiffness and soreness. There are no clear rules on progression, since everybody is different and their bodies react differently to certain exercises. It is up to the individual to know how their body feels and when they are able to handle an increase in training. In general, it is a good idea not to increase activity levels more than every one or two weeks and also to decrease if the increase hurts you in any way. Remember the saying "No pain, no gain" is not necessarily a good one.

Frequency Generally a frequency of every other day or 3 days a week is the minimum to get positive benefit from any activity. Why is this true? ANS: if you do an activity only every once in a while no real benefit will come from it, you must have some consistency in order for positive outcomes; the activities build upon each other to strengthen the body in what ever focus you have. Obviously many people, many of you, may practice or exercise more often than every other day. This is also an example of the overload principle to increase the amount of time devoted to the activity. There is nothing wrong with doing the various exercises more than the minimum. You just have to be careful due to the increased risk of illness or injury from the stress you are putting on you body. If done intelligently increased training is safe. The main importance is for personal safety and reducing risk of injury, while increasing fitness. We are now going to do an activity that incorporate what we just went over into a realistic situation.