The Differences Between Exercise and Activity

What’s the difference between Activity, and Exercise? Is it the Purpose?

The truth is that the two are inter-related. An Activity can involve Exercise, and Exercise can involve some form of Activity thrown in at the end of an exercise session to make it applicable to their desired sport or competition.

An example of this would be a ‘Throwing and Catching Activity’ at the end of a ‘Strength - Based’ session to improve motor performance in something like Cricket, or even perhaps, Tennis.

An example of the opposite is something like ‘Football Passing practice’, or ‘Netball Shooting practice’, which, are in of themselves, activities, but involve different levels of aerobic and anaerobic fitness, to actually perform the ‘Activity’, or ‘Activity-based movement’.

Exercise can have elements of activity for the purposes of improving performance.

And Activities need levels of fitness to perform those movements and skills.

Now you can see the difference, yet, strong relationship between the two.

This is why, I strongly believe, people go to the gym - to practice both.

On a deeper level, we see people practicing lifting technique (a skill to be continually practiced), which requires a certain level of fitness.

Or, you see people attending a group class, for the purposes of learning a sequence or routine (another skill), and performing those techniques, or sequences of techniques - like those in boxercise, or Zumba - to develop efficiency in that ‘Activity’.

The two are correlated, but different in which they are defined and performed.

Definition of an Activity: ‘The condition in which things are being done’.

Definition of Exercise: ‘Any bodily movement produced b skeletal muscles that require energy expenditure’. 

Thanks for reading!

Brad

Tel: 07376 941640

Email: [email protected]