ACSM Just Rewrote the Definition of 'Physical Fitness'

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has published a roundtable statement that retires the profession's long-standing definition of physical fitness. Instead of splitting fitness into separate 'health-related' and 'skill-related' categories, a system used for roughly 40 years, the group's panel of researchers converged on a single, five-part model. Their argument: the two old categories overlapped too much in practice to stay useful.

What changed

• The older model split fitness into two buckets: health-related (cardio, muscular fitness, body composition, flexibility) and skill-related (agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, speed).
• The new statement collapses that split into five unified components: cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular fitness (strength, endurance, power), body composition, flexibility, and neuromotor fitness (balance, agility, gait speed).
• It was written by a 21-member, multidisciplinary panel spanning three countries and 20 institutions, led by Deb Riebe, PhD, FACSM, of the University of Rhode Island.
• It appears as 'The Components of Fitness: A Roundtable Statement by the American College of Sports Medicine' in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, ACSM's flagship journal, this August.

“Health and performance related components of physical fitness are no longer separate, as each contributes to each other.”