I opened this thread thinking that the subject would be mental fitness.
Nevertheless, will add my two-cents worth representing the atypical THR forum member. Being an older woman reading these posts, I chuckle at the enthusiasm, and frame of reference of the enthusiastic. It's easy to guess who's over fifty or sixty in this thread.
It's not possible to know at forty how one feels or thinks at fifty or sixty, let alone what is required at eighty.
It's been said that wisdom is the knowledge of the fitness of things.
I talk long walks, enjoy quietude, do Callanetics, pray, study the Bible, and am learning to shoot as a challenge to myself. To my way of thinking, poise, graciousness, and kindness are the key to self-protection. The gun is merely a symbol of the line I've drawn.
A note about the word "health". It comes from the same word that also means hale, hearty, whole, and holy.
O.E. hælþ "wholeness, a being whole, sound or well," from PIE *kailo- "whole, uninjured, of good omen" (cf. O.E. hal "hale, whole;" O.N. heill "healthy;" O.E. halig, O.N. helge "holy, sacred;" O.E. hælan "to heal"). Healthy is first attested 1552.
Fitness is the result of being well balanced.
Mahatma Gandhi could probably not have kept the fitness regimes touted here, but he walked hundreds of miles. His fitness was in creating peace and dignity for his people. "I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence... I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.
But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment. Forgiveness adorns a soldier...But abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish; it is meaningless when it pretends to proceed from a helpless creature...."
I can only choose not to shoot when that is a choice from the strength to choose to shoot. If my choice not to shoot is from cowardice, it has no power. That is part of why I am learning to shoot. Because Gandhi was right. Moral power is a force which evil cannot withstand.