<img src="https://healthylife7.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/aol_mens_fitness_591-2.png” alt=”Men’s Fitness”>Sean Felenczak
Sun, August 23, 2026 at 2:17 AM UTC
What does it mean to be “physically fit?”
Is it how you look? How strong you are? How fast you are?
The American College of Sports Medicine, one of the most highly regarded organizations in exercise science and health, convened a roundtable of their experts to figure this out. For 40 years, ACSM divided physical fitness into “health-related” components (cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular strength/endurance, body composition, flexibility) and “skill-related” components (agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, speed).
But it turns out, there is much overlap between these components. Balance, for example, was considered a skill-related component. But balance is just as important for health, since it could save you from a fall or injury. As a result, the ACSM panel scrapped the health/skill dichotomy entirely and created one unified model. The new unified model has the following five components:
Cardiorespiratory Fitness – your heart/lungs’ ability to deliver oxygen during activity
Muscular Fitness – strength, endurance, and power combined into one category
Body Composition – fat mass vs. fat-free mass (muscle, bone, etc.)
Neuromotor Fitness – balance, agility, and gait speed (this takes the place of the previous skill category)
Flexibility – joint range of motion
To make the final cut, each component had to meet the following criteria: it can be improved by exercise, it affects ability to exercise, it’s linked to health outcomes, and it can be practically measured in a gym or clinic
The practical takeaway from all this is to make yourself as well-rounded as possible. You can program your training to optimize for one or two things, but that doesn’t mean you should completely negate everything else. The good news is that many of these are interconnected. For example, you can try to increase your strength (Muscular Fitness), train through a full range of motion (Flexibility), and improve your fat-free mass (Body Composition) all at the same time.
To answer our earlier question: physical fitness is not about how you look, how strong you are, or how fast you are… it’s all of the above. The ACSM’s updated model makes the case that true fitness is multidimensional: cardio health, strength, body composition, neuromotor skills like balance, and flexibility all contribute to how well your body functions and how long it keeps functioning well
This story was originally published byMen’s Fitnesson Aug 23, 2026, where it first appeared in theNewssection. Add Men’s Fitness as aPreferred
