Fit for What?
Fitness makes more sense when we stop asking how healthy someone looks and start asking what their life actually requires them to do.
I’ve spent a lot of my life around people whose jobs required them to be ready to do something.
As an ocean lifeguard, it was pretty obvious. Nobody cared what I could bench press if I couldn’t get through the surf and help someone who was in trouble.
The Army made the same lesson even clearer.
And after years of working with public-safety professionals, I’ve come to believe we sometimes make fitness more complicated than it needs to be while simultaneously making it far too simple.
We ask:
How strong are you?
How fast can you run?
What’s your body fat?
What’s your blood pressure?
How much do you sleep?
Those can all be useful questions.
But there’s another question that probably needs to come first:
Fit for what?
A Different Way to Think About Fitness
The American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association recently released their first comprehensive cardiovascular-care framework specifically for what they call tactical athletes: military personnel, firefighters, law-enforcement officers, EMS professionals, pilots, and others whose occupations can suddenly place extraordinary demands on them.
What caught my attention wasn’t another exercise recommendation.
It was the framework itself.
The authors argue that cardiovascular health in these professions shouldn’t be evaluated by looking only at the person’s medical condition. Clinicians should also consider the actual demands of the job, the environment in which those demands occur, and what could happen to teammates or the public if that person suddenly becomes incapacitated.
That makes sense to me.
A firefighter doesn’t experience cardiovascular demand sitting in a quiet examination room.
It may happen carrying equipment up stairs in extreme heat.
A police officer may go from sitting in a cruiser to maximal exertion with almost no warning.
The military has its own combinations of load, environment, fatigue, stress, and uncertainty.
The question isn’t simply:
Are you healthy?
It’s:
Do you have the capacity to meet the reasonable demands of your life and function?
That’s a very different question.
And I don’t think it applies only to tactical athletes.
Your Life Has a Mission Profile Too
Most people aren’t going to climb a ladder into a burning building today.
But everybody has a function.
Maybe you need to carry groceries up three flights of stairs.
Maybe you want to play on the floor with your grandchildren and be able to get back up.
Maybe your work requires eight hours of concentration.
Maybe your family needs you to remain calm during a difficult conversation.
Maybe an unexpected $800 expense shows up next week.
Maybe someone you love needs help.
Maybe an opportunity appears and requires you to learn something you’ve never done before.
Those are all demands.
And they’re not all physical.
That’s why Comprehensive Fitness has nine domains.
Physical Fitness asks whether your body has sufficient capacity.
Emotional Fitness asks what happens when pressure rises.
Financial Fitness creates options when life costs more than expected.
Family and Social Fitness help determine whether relationships can withstand demand.
Occupational Fitness asks whether you’re capable of doing meaningful work sustainably.
Intellectual Fitness matters when yesterday’s answer no longer solves today’s problem.
Environmental Fitness asks whether the conditions around you help or hinder everything else.
And Spiritual Fitness asks the question underneath all of it:
What is all this capacity for?
Fitness Isn’t a Score
This is where I think our culture sometimes gets fitness wrong.
We turn it into numbers.
More weight.
Lower body fat.
More money.
More productivity.
Better sleep scores.
Higher performance.
But capacity only matters in relation to what we’re asking it to accomplish.
The new cardiovascular guidance makes this explicit clinically. A health condition can’t be interpreted completely without considering the occupational demand surrounding it.
That doesn’t mean standards don’t matter.
They absolutely do.
It means the standard should have something to do with the function.
That’s what Fit for Function. Ready for Life. has come to mean to me.
Not elite at everything.
Not optimized.
Not perfectly prepared.
Capable enough to meet the demands of the life you’ve chosen and the responsibilities you’ve accepted.
And perhaps capable enough to absorb some of the demands you didn’t choose.
Put It Into Practice
Try something simple this weekend.
Don’t start by evaluating your fitness.
Start by evaluating your function.
Ask:
What does my life regularly require from me?
Then consider where your current capacity and those demands don’t quite match.
Maybe your life requires more strength.
Maybe it requires more patience.
Maybe it requires more financial margin.
Maybe it requires better recovery.
Maybe it requires deeper relationships.
Maybe it requires learning something new.
Maybe it requires letting something go.
Don’t try to fix all of it.
Find one gap that matters.
Then identify the First Right Move that would begin building capacity there.
Because the goal isn’t to become fit according to somebody else’s scoreboard.
It’s to become increasingly capable of living your own life well.
That’s the relentless pursuit of a better self as I understand it.
Not perfection.
Preparation.
Capacity.
Readiness.
Fit for Function. Ready for Life.
Do Better.
Source
Dineen, E. H., Haigney, M. C., Levine, B. D., et al. (2026). Clinical considerations for the care of the tactical athlete with cardiovascular abnormalities: A scientific statement from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. Circulation. Published online September 3, 2026. DOI: 10.1161/CIR.0000000000001476.
