By Dave Werner
What does it mean to be fit? Fitness can be tricky. How do you sort through all the options to figure out the best use of your training time? Especially, how do you do that when you have pain or injury or other issues?
At the lowest physical point in my life, I needed a cane to walk because my right leg kept collapsing. I had already had surgery and other medical care, but there came a time when I had to figure out why I was in constant pain, how to solve that problem and reclaim my fitness. Which led me to really think about what fitness is…..other than the obvious – lack of pain.
Fitness is almost always defined in terms of some specific activity like running or bicycling. Sometimes fitness is defined by a particular characteristic like how strong you are, how fast can you sprint or how high can you jump. But looking at physical performance with too narrow of a view almost always leads us into stalled progress or some other trouble.
General Fitness is the ability to do a wide variety of things with reasonable competence and requires a balanced mix of capabilities: balanced strength throughout the body, flexibility, range of motion, endurance, skill, stamina.
When you are assessing your fitness developing a training plan, it’s easy to get lost in all the details and end up with a hodgepodge instead of a productive training plan. This is where my decades of experience – as a young athlete, as a Navy SEAL, as a disabled veteran, as an engineer, as a fitness coach – can help you.
I have learned through many successes and many failures that I have to start with a clear comprehensive understanding of my current capabilities in order to get anywhere. Using the assessment I’ve developed, through experience, we can make a training map tailored to your needs, including injury recovery, fitness and other goals.
Are you ready to take on the challenge of creating a better version of yourself? Let’s get started.