Is physical activity or physical fitness more important in defining health benefits?
PURPOSE: We addressed three questions: 1) Is there a dose-response relation between physical activity and health? 2) Is there a dose-response relation between cardiorespiratory fitness and health? 3) If both activity and fitness have a dose-response relation to health, is it possible to determine which exposure is more important? METHODS: We identified articles by PubMed search (restricted from 1/1/90 to 8/25/00) using keywords related to physical activity, physical fitness, and health. An author scanned titles and abstracts of 9831 identified articles. We included for thorough review articles that included three or more categories of activity or fitness and a health outcome and excluded articles on clinical trials, review papers, comments, letters, case reports, and nonhuman studies. We used an evidence-based approach to evaluate the quality of the published data. RESULTS: We summarized results from 67 articles meeting final selection criteria. There is good consensus across studies w
