What is Exercise?

For the last two thousand years, most people have understood art as an imitation of reality. This tradition was started by Plato and his student Aristotle and though they disagreed about whether or not art was beneficial for society, they found common ground in their thinking that art was mimetic - an intuition which, millennia later, Shakespeare would commemorate with Hamlet’s explanation of Art’s purpose as “to hold as it ‘twere a mirror up to nature”. It goes without saying that this definition alone is clearly false, most of modern and post-modern art in no-way resembles or imitates reality and even at the time of Shakespeare it seems like arguing for music as a representation of real world sounds might have been a quite arduous task. So other’s have, of course, put forward numerous definitions across the centuries, however, that would escape the scope of this article and finds it’s relevance in another time and place. It should suffice to simply note that there is no single definition of art but that a dominant and, in many ways, useful definition has been of art as a mimetic enterprise.

But now you might be asking, what does all this talk of art have to do with health and fitness? The answer, my dear reader, is quite a lot, but the focus point I want to hone in on today, is this quest for a definition. Like the Greek scholars Plato and Aristotle, I want to post a question, and the query is this: What is exercise?

I’m curious to discover where the exploration takes us so let us begin. A common definition is of exercise is that it is a physical activity that enhances or maintains fitness and overall health. In order to understand this, we must know what physical activity, fitness and health themselves are, so let’s look at those.

Physical activity is voluntary bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that results in energy expenditure. So walking to the mailbox or picking up a chair or standing in line at the grocery store - would all be examples of physical activity. Even getting in an argument with your spouse and pacing about the room in a steaming fit of inner rage or blowing bubbles with some gum could be considered physical activities - not just childish endeavours.

Fitness can be thought of as a set of attributes that people either have or achieve. Someone is tall or short, thick or thin, can rust fast or slow, get our of breath when walking up the steps or can run for miles while talking on the phone. This huge collection of skills which people have falls generally into two categories, one related to health, the other to athletic ability. The health related attributes are those such as cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, flexibility, body composition, fat percentage. Examples of the athletic skills might be agility, vertical jump, etc. Together we sports scientists and trainers can measure each fitness skill from muscular strength and VO2 Max to body composition and flexibility and construct a broad picture of someone’s fitness. They will score high in some attributes and low in others and much of that comes down to physical laws. For instance, somebody big and strong enough to bench press 600 pounds will probably not have a fast time in the 10k, simply due to the amount of energy required to move such a large body and the requisite speeds over that long of a distance.

The third core component of exercise is: Health. It can be thought of as a state or condition of the human body. A healthy body is one that is free from illness or injury. A person who has the flu is not at that time healthy. Positively formulated, health is a state of physical, mental and social well-being. Thus, a college student is healthy if they have a solid circle of friends, a stable personality and emotional state, and can do all general daily activities in a pain-free way.

So now, revisiting our definition of exercise, with a bit of substitution we observe that exercise is any voluntary movements expending energy that maintains or builds fitness attributes like muscular strength or agility and promotes a bodily state free from illness and injury.

Based off of this definition, one could derive that the purpose of exercise is to enhance health or athletic skills through movements. So did we find a mirror? Not necessarily, and since exercise seems to be a tool with the purpose of maintaining and building up fitness and health, it’s unlikely to be used as poetic metaphor by the next Hamlet any time soon, still I hope the next time you come across an activity that builds fitness and health that the word exercise might just fall into your mind.