Total Wellness: What is it and Why is it Important
Social
Total wellness includes being healthy in all areas of wellness: mental/emtional, physical, and social. This is important to have a healthy and happy lifestyle, and to maintain it. Mental/emotional wellness refers to being comfortable with the people around you and your environment, as well as how you react to events in life. When you feel mental/emotional tension, you are experiencing stress, which can drastically effect your mental/emotional wellness. Physical wellness refers to how you maintain your physical health, such as eating healthy, exercising, and staying mentally healthy. Social wellness is the ability to listen and interact with others often and well. As a whole, your total wellness can affect the way you live your life, and how healthy you are while you do it.
Mental/Emotional
Physical
Physical Wellness and Setting Goals
Physical wellness is important to keep our bodies functioning properly, and setting goals can keep our physical wellness sustained. To have good physical wellness, you have to find a balance between physical activity and good nutrition. To find this balance setting SMART goals can be an easy way to achieve that. SMART goals are goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. This provides and easy way to set goals that you can realistcally achieve. Some health-related components of physical wellness are body-fat composition, flexibility, muscular endurance, muscular strength, and cardiovascular endurance which you should maintain to get benefits such as a longer life, less risk of disease, and more energy. As you can see, physical wellness and setting goals affects all parts of our life, not just our appearance and how we want to look.
Assessing Health and Fitness
Assessing your health and fitness is extremely important to figure out a wellness plan. You can assess your health and fitness subjectively, including your eating habits and health conditions, or objectively, including your weight, blood pressure, and BMI. You can use national averages to make sure your objective assessment numbers are average and healthy. You can also assess your fitness levels by doing physical tests and measuring your results. The FTT principle can be used help you increase your physical fitness, and includes doing exercises with the recommended frequency, intensity, time, and type. There are also the principles of overload (not overworking your body), progression (improving over time), and specificity (the training of a specific muscle). The three main types of fitness include cardiovascular training, resistance training and flexibility training. Cardiovascular fitness is your bodies ability to get oxygen to your blood and muscles. You can do all different intensities of cardio, but mainly focus on quickening your pulse. Resistance training is exercising a specific muscle or group of muscles to strengthen them using an external force. You can use weights or just your body weight in resistance training. Flexibility is the ability to move a joint through its full range of motion, and is important to maintain in order to preform other workouts.
Selecting Physical Activities
It is reccomended that you get 60 minutes of physical activity a day, and choosing something you enojy doing can make this more motivating. When choosing an exercise, you should take into account what components of fitness you want to improve, what you enjoy, what skills you have, and whether or not you like to be in a group or by yourself. Health conditions may limit the amount and type of physical activity you do, as well as our personality and attitude, motivation, environmental considerations, and other considerations. Exercising in hot weather puts you at risk of having a heat stroke or heat exhaustion, while being in cold weather puts you at risk of hypothermia and frostbite. Another vital part of deciding how to exercise is your caloric balance, which is the comparision between how many calories you've burned and how many you have consumed. If you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight, while if you consume more calories than you burn, you will loose weight.
Lifetime Wellness
Total wellness is extremely important to maintain. In 2017, a celebrity fitness trainer collapased in a gym after having a "widow maker" heart attack, which is caused by 100% blockage in the left anterior descending artery. This was a very life changing experience for him, since he almost died, and he has been improving his total wellness ever since. People have problems with physical wellness not only with diet, but with how they percieve their bodies. People don't realize that not everyone can look the same, and that there are actually 3 scientfically recognized shaped bodies: ectomorph, endomorph, and mesomorph. Ectomorph is a slender, slight build with a lower precentage of body fat, small muscle mass, and slimmer bones. Endomorph is a large, soft, pear-shaped body type with a high precentage of body fat, large bone size, and small amount of muscle mass. Mesomorph is a solid, muscular body type with low body fat, medium to large bone size, and large amount of muscle mass. Your body composition describes the precentages of water, fat, bone and muscle in your body. Maintaining a healthy body composition can lower your risks of many diseases and provide you with a longer life. To prevent injuries from occuring when exercising, warming up and cooling down is important, as well as stopping when something hurts. Common injuries to get while exercsing include muscle sprains and strains, shin splits, and blisters. Applying the R.I.C.E method will help heal these injuries.