What is wellness and how it is different from physical fitness?

Many times we say that we are not well and we also hear people repeating the same. Sometimes people say this because they are ill but actually what is this wellness, is this only limited to having fever or suffering from some disease? Does being short tempered is also a sign of not being well or getting injured or having some flu is the only criteria of being unwell? How is wellness different from physical fitness?

Wellness is the integration of all the components of health ; physical fitness , mental fitness , social fitness, emotional fitness , spiritual fitness and aesthetical fitness and ability to change behavior so as to improve the quality of life by changing habits to have proper nutrition , exercise , spirituality , smoking cessation , stress management , drug abuse control and disease prevention.

In other words wellness is the capability of an individual by which he leads a balanced life.

Now moving on to what is physical fitness? Physical fitness is ability to carry out daily task with vigor and alertness without undue fatigue and with ample energy to join leisure time pursuits and to meet unforeseen emergencies. If you come from office and are to stressed and take out your stress on your family by yelling and shouting you are not well, if you come home from college and mother says to you get something done and you do that without freaking out you are fit. So, physical fitness implies task to be performed and the individual’s capacity to perform it even when the work is unexpected.

Different people can have different points of view regarding physical fitness. For a sprinter running fast is fitness for him, but for marathon runner endurance is physical fitness, 100 kg may be too much weight for a human being but for a power lifter weighing 100 kg may be fitness for him and for a doctor, and the proper functioning of physiological systems is physical fitness. Even for the same sport parameters of physical fitness like weight and height for male and females can be different. For senior citizen walking without pains in joint is fitness for him but for a college student having energy to play multiple sports is fitness for him.  So, physical fitness varies according to the nature of work, individual’s size, shape of the body, age and sex.

So wellness is a broad term and physical fitness is an aspect of wellness.

Credits- Vinayak Kaushik , Yashvir singh and Kavinder Saini