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What Your Nervous System Can Tell You About Your Physical Fitness
When we think about measuring physical fitness, we tend to remove our biology from the equation and focus on measurements that are more formally attributed to physical ability. For example, we track our “calories burned” and our “steps taken” and use those metrics to draw conclusions about our fitness.
If, for example, your fitness tracker says you burned 400 calories during a 60-minute exercise class on April 1st and then on May 1st tells you that you burned 600 calories during that same 60-minute class, you can confidently assume that whatever you did between April 1 and May 1 improved your fitness as you’re now able to burn more calories in the same amount of time.
In actuality, our body doesn’t know what calories are. What is happening is that as we push our bodies to perform exercises we expend energy. The heart has to beat faster to pump the blood around the body faster to keep up with the host of other energy expensive activities that are happening in the gym.
Over time, your body gets more efficient at performing exercises. As a result of that training, your heart and other vital organs are better equipped…
