A Comprehensive Approach to Fitness

We believe that a comprehensive exercise program should include the five core components of fitness:
1) Cardiovascular Fitness
2) Muscular Strength and Endurance
3) Flexibility and Range of Motion
4) Balance and Agility
5) Skill/Form Development

Download Chart of Recommended Classes (PDF)

These components are interdependent, so achieving true “fitness” requires doing activities that stimulate each component. This creates a balance and synergy between the different energy and movement systems in your body. Deficiency in one component can limit your body’s ability to optimize your capacity in another. That is why our goal is to help you select activities that ensure you get your weekly recommended allowance of all five core components.

The variety offered by such an approach ensures that your workouts will be fun and progressive in nature. Your body is highly adaptable and needs to be challenged by varied stimuli to change, adapt, and get stronger. Without this variety, your ability to function and perform in sports and daily activities will plateau, taper, or diminish.

Modifying your fitness regimen to create a complete five-component program may be as simple as taking a dance class to improve your footwork and agility; adding some new lifting techniques to enhance strength, range of motion, and coordination; or trying a different aerobic activity like swimming to build muscular endurance and cardiovascular capacity.

Be wise in how you invest your workout time, and let our Fitness Specialists help you make Informed Fitness choices. For more information or to make an appointment, call 212.369.8890 ext. 2247.

The Five Core Components of Fitness

CARDIOVASCULAR FITNESS
Cardiovascular fitness is enhanced through aerobic exercise that stimulates the lungs, heart, and circulatory system. By training in different heart-rate zones, you can accomplish specific goals, such building endurance, weight management, and cardiac rehabilitation. You can also improve the way your body transports and utilizes oxygen (which affects the intensity of your exercise as well as your capacity for it). Using a heart-rate monitor during your aerobic exercise will help you stay within the appropriate heart-rate zones for maximum benefit.

The most common aerobic exercises are swimming, jogging, biking, and using cardio-exercise equipment like treadmills, elliptical machines, stair climbers, and rowing ergometers. Group exercise classes are also excellent ways to gain cardiovascular fitness, especially spinning, step classes, dance classes, urban rebounding, and other classes that involve constant motion.

Complementary Components

MUSCULAR STRENGTH & ENDURANCE
Muscular strength and endurance can be achieved through strength and resistance training. The benefits include increasing muscle mass, building muscle tone, rehabilitating from injury or inactivity, or as part of a weight-loss program. Increased muscle mass has the added benefit of raising your metabolism, which helps you burn more calories.

Strength and resistance training can include weight lifting, body weight exercises, band and stretch-cord work, jumping and bounding, medicine ball exercises, and any other movement that puts a load on the muscles and skeleton. Small Group Training classes like Kettlebells and TRX are excellent ways to combine strength training with other core components.

Complementary Components

FLEXIBILITY & RANGE OF MOTION
Increasing flexibility and the body’s range of motion can be accomplished through any exercise that helps elongate the muscles and increase the movement of a joint. In addition to reducing the risk of injury, this has benefits to muscular development and improving your blood flow, so stretching exercises are an essential partner to any strength training and cardiovascular work.

A structured flexibility program that accompanies a strength training regimen can include one of the many forms of yoga, a Pilates class (which also helps develop core strength and good posture), or simply being mindful of exercising through a full range of motion while doing strength training. Stretching should be done gradually (and not cause pain), when the muscles are warm, and in a controlled manner (instead of bouncing) in order to allow muscles to relax and therefore retain their elongated length.

Complementary Components

BALANCE & AGILITY
Balance and agility are necessary for everyday activities, such as walking down the street. Being able to dodge bike messengers, dog walkers, dog droppings, and other obstacles in an instant often requires a quick adjustment (agility) without falling over (balance).

Balance and agility are also essential elements of sports performance. Quickly changing direction, sprinting towards the goal, or changing from an offensive position to a defensive one are all sports-specific applications of balance and agility. Balance is a function of our ability to know where our body is in space and be able to recover from a stumble or compensate for an unstable surface. Agility is our ability to quickly respond to changes around us without losing our balance.

Whether you want to improve sports performance or prevent falls, there are specific exercises and movements that can help improve your balance and agility. One way is to perform strength training exercises while standing instead of sitting, or while balancing on a physioball, or while standing on one leg. Exercise classes such as dance, yoga, tai chi, and Pilates also are good choices. Other options include incorporating activities like jumping rope, single leg and multi-joint movements, ladder drills, and lifting weights on a physioball.

Complementary Components

SKILL & FORM DEVELOPMENT
All movements should be done with correct form and posture. It ensures that you receive maximum benefits, build confidence, and reduce the potential for injury. An Informed Fitness plan will include practice, reinforcement, repetition, and drilling to ensure that you utilize proper form.

Proper skill and form development can be accomplished through the repetition of drills that initially compartmentalize elements of the full motion until these portions of movement are coordinated. Then the elements are put together as a whole in a slower motion to allow the muscle sequencing to become imprinted. Finally, normal speed of movement is added to prepare for actual competitive conditions. Whether you are doing weight lifting, running, swimming, or group exercise classes, there should always be a focus on proper skill execution.

Complementary Components