The following list describes the various components of fitness:

• Agility
• Balance
• Coordination
• Endurance
• Flexibility
• Power
• Strength

I put them in alphabetical order – this is not a prioritized list. They are all important.

Agility - the ability to move swiftly and while changing direction. Whether you are dodging a runaway shopping cart in a parking lot or making a sharp cut while playing a sport, agility is of great importance.

Balance – the ability to maintain body equilibrium. It should be rather obvious why good balance is essential to safe and effective movement.

Coordination – the ability to produce harmonious functioning of muscles or groups of muscles in the execution of movements. This is about combining successive muscle actions to create successful movement. Everything from opening a jar to learning to tango requires good coordination.

Endurance – the ability or capacity to continue to perform effectively for longer periods of time. You don’t need marathon levels of endurance. Just enough to allow you to enjoy living without having everything exhaust you.

Flexibility – the ability to move through acceptable range of motion. In many ways, the level of success you find in daily movement and in sports play is directly related to the degree of flexibility you possess.

Power – the ability to generate a large amount of force in a short amount of time. For example, being able to jump very high is an example of power. But so is pulling the starter cord on a lawn mower.

Strength – the ability to generate a large amount of force irrespective of time. Strength is often one of the most misunderstood components of fitness. It is not about who can bench the most. What it is about is your ability to pick up and put down everything you need or want to as you go through your days – and to do so effectively and without injury.

Now, don’t get overwhelmed thinking that you have not been specifically targeting one of the areas above. By their very nature, any human movement will require two or more of the above. That means you can blend your workouts in such a way that you derive benefit from training each component of fitness. It is not possible in a newsletter article to lay out a strategy that will work for all of you to effectively blend the above components. There are too many variables among all of you to make that possible. Readers who are personal training clients of mine will be able identify nearly all of the components of fitness if you think about the programs I have designed for you.

Whatever workout plan you follow, just think about this - notice the one word that is consistent in every definition: Ability. What you have the ability to do in many ways defines who you are and how you can live.

My point: Long-term success with fitness is only possible if you make a connection between better fitness as described here and living more fully. Short-term, avoidance goals like “lose 20 pounds” are too general and disconnected from a sense of quality of life. They may provide short-term motivation, but will become less-inspiring over time.