What is The Physically Unfit Indian Myth all about? It has long been said that Indians are physically unfit.
Whether we accepted it or not, we almost never rose to verify it.
What is Physical Fitness?
Let’s back up for a bit. What does physically fit really mean? Does it mean someone free of illness, lacking need of all or any health care? Does it mean someone being able to run the marathon daily? Not necessarily. Physical fitness simply means the ability to go on functioning without any glitches or breakdowns for a considerable period of time. This includes your regular hours of sleep, a sufficient if not perfect diet and certain physical activities regularly.
Can we say that our nation is physically unfit?
A professional could give you a lot of reasoning, but let’s take a layman’s view. I’d say we are a nation that has needed to be physically fit for a very long time now. Our livelihood depends on it. What would happen say, if one fine day the villages that we depend on for food, decided that it is beyond their physical ability to burn their backs in the sun from dawn to dusk to sow, nurture and harvest the crops manually as they usually do? Or if most office goers decided that they couldn’t any more pull off the extra hours to meet a deadline or couldn’t beat the crowd for commute to work each day? In that case we’d be in a serious trouble. Our economy would take a hit, both crop and monetary resources plummeting. We wouldn’t function that way for too long. Thankfully that has never happened so far.
Vectors of fitness.
Physical fitness roughly comprises of measuring muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility and strength of the heart or cardiovascular strength and body composition.
- With people working hours on end to provide for an ever growing nation, staying fit is extremely important.
The same could be said for muscular endurance and flexibility.
- As for body composition one only needs to look to find out. True that some of us due to our cosmopolitan lifestyles tend to be overweight and heart attacks are common among such crowds, but that isn’t all of the country. Our villages define us. And our villages are still home to hardworking enduring class of people whose fitness levels are way higher than those in cities.
- It doesn’t help that we do not have enough doctors and medical infrastructure to get by. But when we have continued to grow in spite of all that, what does that say about us? Doesn’t physically unfit seem inappropriate?
- Our country boasts of a young population. A healthy young population with potential and has been one been one of the largest provider of human resources across to the world.
We accept our inability to have bettered ourselves at health services and welfare. The only thing our fellow countrymen suffer is from the lack of proper nutrition, proper awareness at times but never can we say that we physically unfit. We run a country by our bustle, our endless toil. Some of us sometimes tend to get lazy but we don’t think it is fair to generalize and undermine our everyday struggle for the habits of a few. Physical unfitness is not an option for us. We wouldn’t have survived under different circumstances.
Also read : How Exercise Helps Release Stress
