5 Components of Fitness

Group4 Fitness Systems 5 Components of Total Body Fitness


At Group4, we believe that fitness is achieved through the combination of 5 basic components. Any permanent change that anyone has made to their body at any time in their life has involved each of these 5 Components to some degree. The five components of fitness are nutrition, cardio respiratory training, resistance training, nutritional supplementation and personal assistance. Let’s take a closer look at all 5:

Resistance Training

Component 1: Nutrition

Nutrition refers to the number and types of calories that you consume each and every day. Simply put, a calorie is a unit of energy. If the number of calories, or energy, that you consume on a daily basis equals the number of calories that your body burns off in a day, your weight will stay the same. Following in that logic, if you consume more calories than you burn off, you will gain weight. Now, what will happen if you eat fewer calories than you burn off? Exactly, you will lose weight.


The nutritional component, though often the first one to be overlooked in the gym world, is THE MOST IMPORTANT component when it comes to reaching your goals! Spending an hour in the gym every day is a great way to get in shape, but if all of that hard work isn’t supported by good nutrition, you are wasting at least half of your efforts.


Component 2: Cardio-Respiratory Training

Cardio-respiratory Training refers to any type of activity like walking, jogging, running, biking, stair climbing, spinning, swimming, rowing or any other type of sustained activity that elevates your heart rate and gets you breathing a bit heavier. The primary goal of this type of training is to increase the amount of calories you are burning during your day.

Proper Nutrition

Component 3: Resistance Training

As mentioned earlier, cardio-respiratory training burns calories while you are doing it. Resistance training, however, can increase the amount of calories that you burn at rest! Resistance, or weight training will not only make your body stronger, more toned, and more energetic, but by increasing the amount of lean mass on your frame, you are actually increasing your resting metabolic rate.


Lean mass, or muscle tissue, is essentially your Fat-burning Machinery. One pound of lean muscle tissue can burn up to 10 times more calories per day than a pound of fat tissue. If these benefits aren’t enough to get you excited to lift some weights, resistance training will also decrease your risk of diseases like osteoporosis and diabetes.


Component 4: Nutritional Supplementation

In trying to lose weight, we do 2 things: we increase the work our bodies do, and we decrease the amount of calories we take in to fuel that work. When we take in fewer calories, we also take in fewer nutrients. When we exercise more, our nutrient requirements increase so that our bodies can deal with the stress, recover and stay healthy. How do we support our bodies without increasing the calories we eat or decreasing the work we do? One way is to ensure that we are eating all nutrient dense foods, but even then we are missing some vital vitamins and minerals. The more reasonable solution is to supplement our diets with calorie-free nutritional supplements.


To be effective, supplementation needs to be individualized. The only way to know which nutrients your body needs and what supplements will be not only effective but also safe for you to take is to know the amount and types of the foods you are eating, what your activity levels and goals are, what your health history is, and a number of other factors. Random supplementation is like baking without a recipe, measuring devices or a temperature gauge on your oven.

Personal Assistance

Component 5: Personal Assistance

Now you know what to do- you know that you need cardio and resistance training. You know that you need to eat well and balance out your nutrition with supplements where appropriate. But do you know how much of what and when? Do you know when to change your meal plan and when to increase the amount of weight you are lifting? How about how often you should take a day off?


Personal Assistance is basically fulfilling each person’s need to have a personal trainer or coach in their lives.   Someone who will not only help you define your goals and create the structure through which you will be able to reach them, but also someone who will be with you changing variables as your body adapts. A personal trainer offers motivation, accountability, structure, knowledge and support. Without proper instructions as to how to use the first 4 components, how successful do you think you’d be?