What is physical fitness?

The traditional aim of Physical Education is to promote the three 'S's: Suppleness, strength and
stamina. To these relatively utilitarian physical virtues one might add the aesthetic culture of physique
through body-building, and the culture of the mind as well as the body through training in martial arts.
All have been pursued in the name of 'physical fitness'.
To talk of 'fitness' immediately begs the question, fitness for what? Chess players as well as
philosophers do well to include physical exercise as part of their daily regime. If you are out of shape
physically, your mental stamina will suffer. Other vocations — such as fireman or soccer referee, to
take two relatively extreme examples — require a rather higher level of physical fitness.
In competitive sport, there is no limit. Paraphrasing the Duchess of Windsor, You can never be too
rich or too fit. Yet there are enormous differences between the requirements of different sports. The
400 Pound sumo wrestler would be considered supremely fit for what he is required to do. Sebastian
Coe, the famed British middle distance runner of the 80's, reputedly had a heart so enlarged that
when resting his heart rate was just six beats a minute. (With a heart as big as that, he would
naturally join the Tory party.)
Coe was supremely fit, but as any retired athlete will verify, the added muscle mass requires a
continued regime of strenuous exercise or it can become a serious health liability.
The idea of the states of 'fitness' and 'unfitness' as being states of human perfection and its opposite
traces back to the Ancient Greeks. The Olympic athletes, gods and heroes celebrated in Greek
statues are the closest approach to a visual representation of Plato's Form or Idea of 'Man'. The
notion survives with a smattering of scientific respectability in Darwin's theory of evolution: to be
physically fit is to attain the ideal physical form that evolution has designed for us. If we could read
our genes, we could draw a blueprint of the perfect body that would have been ours if only we had
looked after it properly. — But then I am forgetting that some do far better than others in the genetic
lottery. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, so the saying goes.
What would the Ancient Greeks have made of the Paraplegic Olympics? Plato and Aristotle would
have surely recognised that what we celebrate when we celebrate athletic and sporting achievement
is not mere physical perfection or skill but the perfection of the moral qualities of courage and
endurance as well as the intellectual qualities of resourcefulness and inspiration.
I would say the same of body-builders, an art unjustly sneered at by the sports mainstream. Over the
last few decades, female body building in particular has gone off into the stratosphere, with women
achieving physiques once undreamt of, which judged by the Platonic Idea of 'Woman' would be
considered a grotesque parody of a human being. Yet surely here the achievement is just as great as
with those who attain to the heights of any sporting or athletic activity. To achieve the highest
distinction the same mental qualities are required, and it is these that we admire, as much as we
admire the superb definition of a person's triceps.
Perfection of body and mind is the ideal. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the martial arts.
Bruce Lee, the exponent of Jeet Kune Do — or 'Kung Fu' as it is popularly called — is most widely
known for his film roles. Yet it was his genius as a teacher and practitioner of martial arts rather than
as an actor that inspired and continues to inspire tens of thousands of men and women to take up the
different martial arts disciplines. It is less well known that Lee studied Western as well as Eastern
philosophy to a high level. Always suspicious of compartmentalization, Lee sought for wisdom and
enlightenment wherever it could be found — in Kant and Hegel as much as in Lao Tzu or Confucius
— just as he taught that there is no right way but only your way, the path you have forged through
your personal endeavour for self-perfection.
Geoffrey Klempner