Skill related fitness refers to fitness that is related to a particular skill, ability or activity. For example a professional footballer is likely to be far fitter than your average Joe, but in particular will have fitness that’s relevant to the sport. For a footballer this would probably mean they had good quads and other leg muscles, a high VO2 max, good running speed and great cardiovascular fitness. It would not mean that they had a bulky or strong upper body, and in fact may be no more muscular in their arms than you or I. That’s skill related fitness.

The reason for this is that fitness and skill really come down to the exact thing – repeated practice, and in fact in many cases fitness and skill are almost interchangeable. If you have incredibly powerful arms it will automatically improve your gold swing and you’ll probably be able to hit the ball far further than a regular guy. You wouldn’t describe yourself as skilled however, but really the ability of the professional golfer relies on essentially the same key points. A golfer also has large and powerful arms, but their strength is less localised to just the bicep or tricep and also includes all the tiny little supporting muscles in the forearm, upper arm and shoulders that enable them the fine control and precision they require to have a perfect swing time after time. Meanwhile the connections between their neurons and nerve fibres are used over and over each time and so become strengthened in much the same way the muscle becomes strengthened resulting in them becoming easier to access. In much the same time, repeatedly playing football will strengthen the leg muscles and increase cardiovascular fitness through lots of exercise and running – you see your body simply reflects your lifestyle – and that’s really the one secret you need to know to sculpt your body into shape and make it perfect for any purpose. Simply performing the action will force it to adapt to that behaviour so if you want to become better at something or have muscles it requires, simply practice while you’re bad. This is an ability that we’ve developed through evolution, and one that’s enabled us to survive where our competitors died out. The ability to adapt to a situation or a behaviour is one of mankind’s most vital skills.

So effective is this process of ‘skill related fitness’ that you can actually identify someone’s lifestyle and skills simply by looking at them much of the time. Firstly you’ll obviously be able to spot someone who doesn’t have any kind of fitness – they’ll either be horribly thin or largely overweight. This shows that they don’t really have any kind of physical skill or their body would have adapted to their practice. Even if they did have the skill once, the fact that they’ve lost the skill related fitness necessary to perform those actions will mean that they no longer can with anywhere near the talent. You see it works both ways and you can’t really have one without the other.

More impressively though, and if you want to start sounding like Shirlock Holmes you can actually identify a particular skill by someone’s physique. For example, the footballer as discussed will have very little bodyfat (a sign of lots of cardiovascular fitness), strong powerful legs (more so in the quadriceps than the hamstrings) and be fairly light and fast in their movements. Meanwhile a rock climber will have a gigantic lat spread (the ‘wing’ like muscles under the armpits), powerful forearms for gripping onto the rocks, powerful legs and fairly flat pecs (they also tend to have a fairly long reach and light frame – some elements of skill related fitness are genetic you see). A gymnast will similarly have incredibly powerful lats but will also have stronger forearms and shoulders for/from handstands etc. A martial artist or boxers will have low bodyfat and powerful shoulders, triceps, traps, serratus muscles and pecs (the muscles used in punching). Swimmers have low bodyfat and powerful triceps. Finally, the bodybuilder, for whom the fitness literally is the skill, the aim is to have perfectly evenly proportioned muscles (so as to appear to lean towards no particular sport but be powerful in all movements) and very low bodyfat. We could go on with these descriptions all day, but largely the deductions are just down to common sense. In polls gymnasts, swimmers, martial artists and runners have generally been voted to have the best bodies. It’s not just sports that lead to skill related fitness however though and you can also find those who play instruments have large forearm muscles or if they’re wind instruments, large chests and lungs.

The individual components of skill related fitness are muscle strength, speed, cardiovascular fitness, power, muscle control, hand eye coordination and reaction time. While these will all be improved naturally through repeated practice of your chosen skill, you can speed up your improvement by training the individual aspects specifically.

Mack LeMouse

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