Kritiese ontleding van faktore wat fisieke welstand kan beïnvloed

Abstract

Traditionally, health has been viewed as the lack of disease. A broader view of health was introduced in 1947 by the World Health Organization (WHO). What evolves from the WHO's definition of health is a strategy that encompasses medical care, disease prevention, and health promotion. This strategy seeks the development of lifestyles that maintain and enhance wellness. Wellness is defined as an integrated and- dynamic level of functioning oriented toward maximizing potential, dependent upon self-responsibility. The wellness lifestyle is a coordinated and integrated living pattern involving dimensions such as the physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, and occupational dimensions. Physical wellness is an important dimension of wellness. It is the golden thread that penetrates all dimensions of wellness. Although physical wellness comprises a wide field, in the literature it is not clear what the concept involves or which factors influence it. In the RSA the concept of physical wellness is relatively unknown, and is generally referred to as physical fitness. The main purpose of this study is to critically analyse existing literature on physical wellness in order to establish what the concept comprises and to identify factors that may influence it. A recognised research method to establish what a concept involves and to identify the variables that may influence it, is conceptualisation. Thus, the method can also be effectively used to ascertain what physical wellness comprises and which factors influence it. The results of this study seems to indicate that physical wellness is a multi-disciplinary concept, and that it is influenced by unchangeable factors such as race, gender, hereditability and age, and changeable factors such as lifestyle, environment, medical self-care, stress and social interaction.

From the Human Movement Science context, all physical wellness factors that are influenced by exercise, such as lifestyle, anatomical and physiological factors, should be addressed during physical wellness intervention programmes.