‘Fitness’, I believe, is an almost redundant term.

When you think about it for any short amount of time, you will soon come to realise it is too broad, too vague, to be of much use. Are we talking about health, or performance, or resilience, or longevity, or the original Darwinian meaning of ‘fit for a particular context’? All or some of the above? A marathon runner’s idea of fitness is worlds apart from a powerlifter’s definition of the word, as is a gymnast’s and a soldier’s. So what do we mean by ‘fitness’? And until you define that, how do you know what to train or not train?

I prefer to develop people’s physical literacy. I think it trumps trying to be ‘fit’, on every front.

What is Physical Literacy?

Physical literacy is often described as the motivation, confidence, physical competence, knowledge and understanding that provides human beings with the movement foundation for lifelong participation in physical activity. Importantly, it incorporates elements that are beyond mere physical development, such as motivation and confidence to move, and ranks them just as highly as attributes like strength and speed. Anyone who trains in parkour for even a single session soon understands just how fundamental these non-physical elements are to our natural movement capabilities, and our potential.

If we do drill down into the purely bodily aspects of physical literacy, we understand that the term refers to a healthy balance of movement attributes, such as coordination, balance, agility, strength, spatial awareness, etc., rather than an accumulation of specific movement skills, such as a penalty kick in football or a short-range putt in golf, or a deadlift in powerlifting or even a pull-up.

It is now well understood that a strong base of general physical literacy sets the preconditions for being able to easily and quickly assimilate any specific movement skill, and thus it is general physical literacy that we should be encouraging and developing first in our young people, as well as restoring to those adults who weren’t fortunate enough to access this potential during childhood.

Movement Equals Health

The thread is easy to follow, and obvious once you begin to look for it. Physically literate individuals are more likely to move more often: they enjoy sport, going to the gym, going running or hiking or climbing – they enjoy using their bodies, because moving seems relatively easy for them. They pick up new skills quicker, which reinforces motivation and increases their chances of sticking with any given movement practice.

Those people, and those cultures, which move more often, with more variety, stay healthy for longer. Just look at the blue zones[1] of the world, where lifespans regularly hit the 100 years mark, and you will see that one of their common denominators is constant, varied movement from childhood to old age.

Simply put, physical literacy leads to more movement, and more movement leads to health and longevity.

Not only that, it creates the potential for better performance too. We’ve all encountered individuals who are seemingly naturally ‘talented’ at any sport they try their hand at. These are the kids who end up playing for their school’s First Fifteen rugby team as well as the First Eleven football team and also win the tennis and basketball competitions. The truth is not that they are naturally talented, but that for one reason or another – whether by chance or by design – they grew up developing a high level of physical literacy, and thus were able to adopt any movement skill they encountered with relative ease and efficiency.

Which brings us to a vital point to grasp: physical literacy is learned. Whether intentionally or not, some people are exposed to environments, role models or teachers in their developmental years that encourage and improve their natural movement abilities – their coordination, proprioception, accuracy, mobility, relative strength, etc. – and some are not. This is very often simply a matter of the wider societal norms they are exposed to from both.

How Do We Build Physically Literate Humans?  

Through focusing on challenging people’s movement skill, not deconstructing it.

General physical literacy should come before sport specific skills. And let’s make no bones about it, most fitness ‘exercises’ seen in gyms use specialized movement skills that are actually rarely, if ever, performed outside of that context. The back-squat is a prime example. That doesn’t mean those movement skills and exercises have no value, they absolutely do, but by themselves they are extremely limited and, I believe, do not contain enough variability and complexity to develop true physical literacy.

So what does develop true physical literacy? Well, that’s actually an easy one to answer: it happens most commonly through play. In fact, locomotor play is nature’s way of ‘training’ an organism to learn and improve its movement potential. That’s why lion cubs play at stalking and fighting – their nature is training them for what their bodies are meant to do when fully grown.

And it’s no different for humans. Running, jumping, climbing, swinging, balancing, rough-housing and wrestling… all these modalities are actually incredibly sophisticated and holistic training methods by which our brains are testing what our bodies can do within our environment. This helps us become stronger, faster, more coordinated, safer and more adaptable.

Play, specifically locomotor play, is the natural method the brain uses to build physical literacy in all of us, therefore any system for developing physical literacy must engage and utilise the components and principles of play.

Play typically involves task-oriented or situational movement, which means the focus is on completing a task or overcoming a challenge rather than performing a skill perfectly or correct according to some arbitrary set of markers. For example, crossing a space without touching the ground (the classic ‘floor is lava’ child’s game) or climbing a tree or avoiding being tagged are all examples of task-oriented activities, drawing on constraints-led models of motor skill acquisition, and are fantastic for the development of general physical literacy and natural athleticism.

The more we enable both kids and adults to engage with these kinds of activities – tasks that encourage people to generate sophisticated movement solutions to complex challenges – the more we build a physically literate population, which is then more likely to enjoy movement and exercise, which hugely increases the chances of people staying active for life.

The Language of Movement

Physical literacy is a powerful term. It connects the notion of movement to the concept of language, and it’s a strong metaphor.

In simple terms, to be able to utilise language you must understand its alphabet, know how to organise letters into words and then how to combine those words using grammar and syntax to create sentences. The letters by themselves are representations without meaning; only full sentences enable fluency and function. Equally, ill-formed and incomplete sentences, poorly spelt and improperly constructed, are clumsy, confusing and ineffective.

Movement is much the same. We can consider fundamental physical capacities – strength, joint mobility, flexibility, power, balance, etc – as the alphabet of movement; essential but ultimately meaningless if left unexpressed or without arrangement.

Combining these capacities – or arranging letters in certain orders – through simple movements gives us words: healthy biomechanics, functional kinetic chains and patterns, strong neuromuscular pathways. I would identify individual functions such as push-ups, pull-ups, squats, etc., as words, to follow the metaphor. But, again, by themselves words are limited in what they can express, only becoming useful when put into a wider context.

For our movement to be truly functional – for language to be truly communicative – we need to be able to form whole sentences: effortless sequences of words moulded by syntax, grammar, punctuation, and used in an infinite variety of combinations to communicate any idea. Endlessly adaptive, creative and effective: the very purpose of language.

And any language is only proven useful when it is put to the test as a communication tool, with the most flexible and descriptive languages being those that can adapt to any scenario. Similarly, we only truly know if our movement and physical training is useful once it is put to the test.

The human body possesses the capacity to produce the most sophisticated physical literature imaginable. It can compose symphonies of movement, across a vast range of modalities, and train itself to master the dialect of almost any task.

With language, the more literate we are, the more we are likely to enjoy reading, to study and learn, and to expand our horizons.

And it’s no different for our movement.

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[1]Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest – Buettner, Dan. 2010.

*Article originally written for Fitpro Live Blog