To the average person, fitness and training are the same, since they both involve sweating and burning of calories. But in actual reality, there is a big difference between fitness and training. Fitness involves sets of exercises taken on to help an individual achieve a good state of health and good feeling in their body. Training however, involves building resistance and strength.
Fitness exercises are geared towards burning calories and maintaining a good size and shape, meanwhile training activities are geared towards making the individual skillful in certain area of specialization. For instance, a footballer must train in order to be successful on the football pitch. It is mandatory, not optional, else they would fail in their set task. For fitness persons, exercising is not mandatory, it is important, but optional; no one imposes it on him.
Fitness is a fundamental part of a healthy person’s regime. It has to be done just to ensure we stay healthy or in shape. Fitness is mostly performed by most people just for the fun of it; some do it to stay in shape, while others do it because they just feel like it. Many gym-goers even go to the gym with exercising as a secondary motive, along with other motives such as socializing and making new friends. With training this is not so, most trainees such as athletes and sports persons know that training is mandatory for them to accomplish their long term performance goals.
With training comes planning. Planning is very important to achieve the desired goal of every trainer, and this planning is done strategically with a series of intense and strenuous exercises going into making it successful. Fitness does not require much planning, as anyone can do certain reps of aerobic exercises each day and still be fit. There is no end goal in mind, other than to be healthy, which is why there is no necessity of systematic planning for a fitness regime.
Fitness does not involve any form of intensity, because you do not necessarily have to have a set goal in mind nor something to look up to to make you always stick with it. Training takes effort and involves pain. It is intense and takes a lot of hard work. It involves putting yourself under a lot of tension to bring about your desired objective, meanwhile fitness is easy and fun, and can be done by almost anybody. It does not require much intensity or much effort, unlike training. Many trainees may want to quit because of the intensity involved, but constantly reminding them of the end-goal makes them spurred to keep at it no matter the pain and pressure involved. They see the pain as mandatory and a normal feeling for them to encounter the rewarding effects of training later on.
With fitness, most people tend to stop working out or exercising once they have gained the desired shape or size they wished for before starting the fitness regimen; they usually do not see a reason to follow through, since they now seem fit. They may just exercise at irregular intervals just for health’s sake. Trainees on the other hand go through the exercises with an end goal in mind, most of which are long-term goals with great rewards. These may include monetary, trophies, accolades and other forms of personal accomplishments. With this end goal in mind, they can easily put aside thoughts of quitting like the average fitness person would. This end goal pushes them to keep going the ‘extra mile’ in their training hoping to reap the rewards sooner or later.
Training is aimed towards making the individual strong and make the body able to do certain tough activities usually not easily achievable. Fitness on the other hand, is geared towards making the individual be in good shape and maintain proper health. Training makes you more conscious of the abilities of your body, its strengths and limitations, how responsive it can be to certain tensions put on it, and how that tension transforms it. It empowers you to know the capabilities of your body, its endurance limits and helps you to stretch yourself even further.
For the average gym-goer, fitness involves going to the gym and repeating the same types of exercises each time. This makes the effect of exercise predictable and yields fewer results, because it gets to a point where the individual plateaus in those sets of exercises and it just becomes the norm, or a fun thing to do; otherwise not stimulating any new desire or growth. With training, series of exercises are systematically arranged and planned to attain specific results.
Training is a task that must be mastered through consistency. Being consistent in training makes the body adapt to it and only then does it start yielding the desired results.
Fitness is something that can be performed on your own without the need for any support or enforcing party; meanwhile with training, because of the intensity of the exercises carried out, there is a tendency to want to quit, which is why training has to be done alongside an experienced coach who encourages you to keep going, even when you feel like quitting. The training coach ensures you stay true to your training goals without compromising. Most of the time, these training coaches help to design the training programs and plan out how to realize the goal.
I wanted to write this blog so that people understand the difference between “training” and “fitness”, and to truly realize what goes into “training.” I also think that training helps one cope with the hardships that we encounter in our lives. How so? Well, if someone can develop themselves to go through a challenging training, he/she will then be able to handle the challenges of life. Because when one is training, he/she is not only training the body, but also (and maybe even more importantly) the mind. And that is why at IMS, I train my clients with the hope that not only can I help them become better ‘performers,’ physically, but also ‘mentally.’
Training changes your philosophy of life because you recognize that you are capable of using your mind to change your body. –Jean Nidetch
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