The future of health/fitness/sports performance

Open Access

Abstract

Exercise relative to health/fitness and sports performance has displayed an evolutionary role over time. Large scale, overriding, factors are present which are likely to help us understand the likely future evolutionary path of health/fitness and sports performance. These factors include: 1) the history of exercise, 2) exercise in its' relationship to health, 3) the need for fitness in the military and first responders, 4) the conflicted relationship between top sport (representing the apex of the human genomic capacity for exercise) versus the overly competitive and compensated nature of top sport. Dominantly, the need for exercise as preventive medicine in a progressively more sedentary society, the need to provide social integration and inclusion in a highly mobile society, the risk of undesirable social outcomes related to top sport and the likelihood of human-cyber interactions are likely to drive the evolution of exercise in the future. ; publishedVersion ; Under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 CC BY-NC license.