Welcome to Matter Realisations' Fitness Page

You may be wondering what a Fitness Page is doing at a Materials Science and Engineering web site. Fitness is a very important part of maintaining a good outlook on life, and a great way of reducing stress. There are all kinds of practical, fitness oriented pages on the Internet. This one has a more theoretical flavour; partially it is to be different, and mostly because I have the tools to be more theoretical.

Like a lot of concepts causually mentioned in ordinary talk, being "in shape" or being "fit" are kind of ambiguous. They mean different things to different people. Here's my take on being fit, or being in shape .

Fitness is based upon three areas: flexibility, endurance and strength. It is supported by diet.

• Endurance is the cornerstone, upon which all our daily living is based. If we can't provide enough oxygen to our tissues to metabolize (burn) organic compounds to produce ATP for driving reactions, we will die. What we do is limited by our ability to get oxygen into, and carbon dioxide out of, our bodies. Our quality of life will not be very good if our peak oxygen processing ability corresponds to our basal metabolism, as we will have to spend all day at rest!
• Strength is our ability to temporarily produce more work than what we are normally producing. A man cannot do as much work as a draft horse over a long period of time, but we are capable of producing as much as 10 horsepower over a short period of time. (Of course, a horse can produce a similarly large amount of power over a short period of time.)
• Flexibility is defined as the range of motion present at a joint, in a specific plane and direction. It is easily possible that some joints are flexible while others are not; or even that a joint is flexible in certain planes and directions but not in others.
• Diet plays the supporting role in developing endurance, strength or flexibility. The determination of an optimal diet is greatly complicated by our lack of knowledge as to what chemical reactions take place within our bodies. Some aspects of diet are obvious; not enough energy content and we consume our own energy stores (fat and muscle). Too much energy content, and we store energy in the form of fat.

Cause and Effect. Many people confuse correlation (usually pointed out in some statistical study) with a casual relation: that there is some cause and effect relationship between one factor and another. Finding correlations between factors can be a useful exercise, but it is the establishment of cause and effect between factors that should be our guide in life.