Fitness(2) and Sport

What do these terms mean to the regular worker-outer? Are the seriously considered?

Dictionary.com
Fitness: Health

Sport: physical prowess in a particular, or several activites: swimming, running, football, baseball, fishing, hunting, etc.

Fitness (2): reproductive representation in subsequent generations (offspring, kin's offspring, offspring's offspring, etc). (i.e. Darwinian Fitness)

Do these terms mean anything to you with respect to (WRT) your exercise regimen? I will try to provide some ideas, examples, and such.

Clearly most people workout to be healthy, or to have fitness, right? Ummmm, I don't think so. Unfortunately, I think most people workout for reasons of vanity: I wanna have a 6 pack, big arms, sexy butt, etc. So why do we care, or do we care at all about Fitness=health. Turns out that this is directly related to the two other terms listed above: Sport and Fitness (or Darwinian Fitness). Here goes. Sport is essentially demonstrating or gaining or practicing to be the best at some activity or activities (see examples listed). There is no end for sporting abilities to stop growing; that is, you can alway improve and get better, faster, bigger, stronger (if you're doing it right). However, sport as we know is a recent evolutionary phenom. There is no good archeaological evidence that our distant ancestors (australopithicines, ardipithicus, etc) engaged in competitive sport. Much to the chagrin of many English blokes they do not stem from a long (evolutionary) history of footballers. Sorry mates! Not "playing" sport is one thing, but they were certainly engaged in a sport. The sport of survival. For our ancestors every turn of a new day (think sands through the hourglass LOL) was a new game. They had to hunt, gather, fight, mate, fend off predators, etc. That is we were sporting animals from the start: we had to be else we would not have survived. So sport begets fitness. We do not engage in fitness to be sporting types, we were made to be sporting types and that is how we get our fitness.

Furthermore, if you can accept (sort of) the rationale that we sport to get fitness (health) then check this out. Health, or being healthy is sexy. Or, put in other terms, what we find sexy is healthy. Let me provide a few examples. On average men prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). This is pretty much a cross-cultural thing, with few exceptions being discovered. So, what's special about .7, or optimal WHR? A freaking lot! First off, optimal WHR predicts whether a woman is going to have complications getting pregnant, during pregnancy, and childbirth. Optimal design lessens the risk in all occasions. Optimal WHR also predicts a woman likelihood of developing physiological (coronary) and psychiatric illnesses; again optimality lessens the chances of developing both. Lastly, optimal WHR predicts the IQ potential of her offspring. So you might ask: Why do men find curvaceous female bodies sexy? No, it's not because the media say so, because what the media throws at us is a complete misrepresentation of what MEN want and like. Rather, it's because finding those shapes sexy in our evolutionary history often led to mating attempts. All other things being equal (which they aren't, I know that) mating with an optimally designed female led to better chances of passing on your genes (Darwinian Fitness). And here's the kicker, when you select a shape to mate with , you pass on the psychological and neurological characteristics that led you to select that shape. Pretty simple and neat, eh? There are several other examples: women find men with more money and resources sexy, but they also prefer masculinized sporty looking males. Specifically they pay attention to the Shoulder-to-hip ratio (SHR); or what we know as the V-shaped male. Well, you should not be surprised to learn that SHR predicts health (mental and physical) and reproductive viability in males. So women like men "see" what is sexy because it is healthy and it is healthy because of sport.

So without belaboring another point, ask your self this the next time you walk into your gym to do a workout: Why am I really here?