Do you want to be healthy, fit or a sports whiz? Its not all the same.

I’ve always wondered why professionals advising people in gyms on topics such as supplements, weight loss products and a raft of other stuff are lumped under the banner of the ‘fitness’ industry. It struck me that there’s a lot of confusion over the notion of fitness, health and wellness. They’re actually very different terms.

The term today sweeps in gyms, yoga studios, strength coaching, nutritionists, equipment makers (right from the TV marketed poorly built ab king to sophisticated thousand dollar machines), supplement makers and sport summer camps not to talk of the growing marathon and cycling clubs. All of them hawk the promise: you will lose weight, you will feel better and/or you will be healthier. The better marketed will tell you how to set targets for weight loss or how finishing a marathon within certain duration or squatting a certain weight category will make you conditioned or strong and thus a healthy individual.

The problem is when we confuse between health, fitness and sports skills. These are three distinct capabilities. Health in my books is the absence of mental and physical infirmity. It’s the biggest category on this list. If you suffer from knee pain, frequent bouts of illness, stress or anything else listed on the Merck Medical Manual, chances are you aren’t healthy. You could be obese or underweight, tall or short; overall a seemingly healthy specimen but still rank quite low on the health scale. The most objective way to gauge ‘health’ is a physical evaluation in a hospital where you undergo a complete check-up: they draw some blood, urine and stick you on a treadmill and subject you to a battery of questions to decide if you are functioning in the bare minimum way that you were built to.

The other way to gauge heath is to ask yourself — am I living a pain free comfortable life, where I can walk up a flight of stairs, lug my suitcase through an airport, keep up with my kids on the beach or park without stress or strain? This is purely subjective, but it’s a crucial one to ask yourself. If you are constantly on the edge reaching for a pack of cigarettes as a stress buster or complaining of an aching back or knees, you are probably on the lower end of health score.

The next, fitness, is the most abused of the three concepts. I find it ludicrous when people remark — Dude, you look fit! My reflexive answer is — fit for what? Fitness is not based on chest size, biceps, low fat content or physical appearance. Fitness is in the simplest terms your body’s capability to complete an action or set of actions without compromising health. Therefore, my ability to coach clients for eight hours a day, play with my dogs on the beach for 30 minutes, socialize with friends and family for an hour, study for two, exercise for another couple and sleep well for seven to eight hours without breaking down any point of the year makes me fit.

Picking two extreme ends of the spectrum; a professional athlete’s ability to play professionally for a chunk of the year and spend the rest of the year training for four hours in the gym, an additional two hours on a court, a few hours filming adverts for products they probably never use and still make time for life would be their definition of being fit. I don’t think I or most other people would get through a day like this, without spending a week in bed. That does not make us unfit. That makes us unfit for their lives, although we could be perfectly fit for our own.

On the other hand, if you seek assistance to carry your own child, can barely get up the flight of stairs to your home without your knees giving way or your default state for 8+ hours a day confines you to a chair, chances are you’ve set a pretty low bar for fitness. This could also be affecting your health.

Now we look at sports skill. This is the part fitness professionals seldom broach. At some point in any endeavour — be it running, lifting weights, cycling or playing recreational sport — the activity becomes competitive. Sure it burns calories, but my definition of when an activity goes from being a fitness endeavour to sports skill is simple- when the risk of getting hurt doing a fitness activity is high, you are trying to acquire a sports skill.

You run a marathon for sport not for health. Running 43 kms does hurt you in a few ways if you don’t hydrate yourself or you continue running with that jiggly knee. Deadlifting 200 kilos makes you exemplarily strong but a bad rep will leave you with a strained lower back. Rafael Nadal underwent surgery for appendicitis, dealt with a dodgy wrist, knee and received stem cell injections for his back. Anyone who went through that in four months is not exactly in the pink of health. But you won’t see me challenge Nadal on the court or in a gym. He is an athlete who is extraordinarily conditioned and adapted to the task he does which is play tennis for hours a day. That may make him a little unhealthy but it still leaves him pretty high on the sports skill and fitness realm of things. There’s a blurry and very personal line you cross when you seek to be fit for life and begin to pursue sport for the sake of fitness.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe more safe activity even if misdirected is better than no activity at all. I just believe you should be crystal clear about why you are undertaking a certain regimen. For example, if you weigh 70 kgs and are attempting to deadlift over 140 kgs, you need to be clear that you want to deadlift 140 kgs because it helps your hamstrings and glutes get stronger, makes you bigger and you are proud to let that show. Similarly if you aim to run a marathon every week, it’s clear you value the sense of accomplishment which comes with completing a long run. Maybe it clears your head and it’s your idea of meditation, but don’t kid yourself that it is an endeavour for health.

Even in the realm of fitness, chances are that being able to deadlift 140 kgs or run a marathon far exceed the functional requirements of most people’s lives. Those are endeavours which fall in the blurry category of when fitness turns into a sport. Goals and objective assessment are crucial steps in mapping out why a certain fitness or nutrition endeavour is worth undertaking. So next time, you set off to run a marathon every month or take on an expensive annual membership at a gym, ask yourself if those are the ideal means or journeys to your fitness and health ends.

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