By Maya Chen, Certified Nutritionist & Wellness Coach · Reviewed by Dr. Rachel Stone, MD

How Many Health-Related Fitness Components Are There?

There are five health-related fitness components: cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition. That is the standard list used in exercise science, school textbooks, and professional fitness certifications. If the question gives you options, the answer is five.

The confusion comes from the fact that some sources say four, some say six, and some say eleven. None of them is lying; they are just counting different things. This article explains the five, why the count sometimes looks different, and which answers will pass your test and serve your health.

Image: State of the Art Wellness

The short answer: five components

The five health-related fitness components, in the order they usually appear in textbooks:

• Cardiovascular endurance: how long your heart, lungs, and blood vessels can deliver oxygen to working muscles.
• Muscular strength: the maximum force a muscle can produce in one effort.
• Muscular endurance: how long a muscle can keep working at a lighter load.
• Flexibility: the range of motion available at a joint.
• Body composition: the proportion of fat mass to lean mass in your body.

These five are sometimes grouped into two families for teaching: cardiovascular endurance is the aerobic component, while the other four are often described together as the musculoskeletal and body-composition components. However you group them, the total stays five.

Why some sources say four

If you see a list of four health-related fitness components, the author has almost certainly merged muscular strength and muscular endurance into a single category called muscular fitness. That is a reasonable simplification: both are trained with resistance exercise, but the standard academic answer keeps them separate, because a set of heavy squats tests strength while fifty push-ups test endurance, and they decline at different rates as we age.

One other source of “four” is a textbook that counts body composition as an outcome rather than a component. Either way, when a test asks for the number of health-related fitness components, the expected answer is five. Some curricula even phrase the question as “the five health-related components of physical fitness,” which gives the answer away.

Why some sources say six or eleven

The “six” answers come from confusing the two families of fitness. Physical fitness has eleven total components: the five health-related ones plus six skill-related ones: agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, and speed. If a source says six, it is listing the skill-related components and has quietly dropped the health-related list. If it says eleven, it is counting both families together.

You can see the full breakdown of both lists, with examples, in our comparison of health vs skill-related fitness components. The memory trick I teach clients: five keeps you alive, six makes you athletic, eleven is everything.

The five, defined in one line each

Beyond the count, a good answer names what each component actually does:

• Cardiovascular endurance: measured by how long you can keep moving, such as walking briskly for 30 minutes, cycling, or swimming, while your heart and lungs keep up.
• Muscular strength: measured by how much you can lift, push, or pull in one maximal effort: the strength to stand up from the floor without using your hands.
• Muscular endurance: measured by how many repetitions you can sustain, such as push-ups, squats, or holding a plank, before your form breaks.
• Flexibility: measured by the range of motion at each joint: reaching your toes with straight knees, turning your head fully to check a blind spot.
• Body composition: measured by the balance of lean mass to fat mass, tracked over months by how clothes fit and how energy feels, not by the daily scale.

For the home tests that measure each one in ten minutes, our article on the health-related fitness components definition walks you through them.

What is NOT counted in the five

Knowing what is not on the list avoids the most common exam mistake. The six skill-related components (agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, and speed) are not health-related fitness components, even though they are excellent qualities to train. Exercise science reserves the “health-related” label for qualities with a direct, measurable link to long-term health, and the skill list does not have that link.

That is also why the official guidelines look the way they do. The World Health Organization recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, plus muscle-strengthening work on 2 or more days. Every recommendation maps to the five health-related components, never to agility drills or reaction-time training. The CDC’s adult guidelines are built on the same five.

Image: State of the Art Wellness

Why the number matters for your health

In my practice, I discovered that people who can name the five components train differently from people who cannot. Knowing the list turns exercise from a vague “I should move more” into a checkable routine: does my week include aerobic minutes, two strength sessions, daily stretching, and enough sleep and protein to protect my body composition? I remember a client who had trained for years, hard and consistently, with zero flexibility work and no idea why his shoulders ached. Two weeks after we added five gentle minutes of stretching to his routine, the ache faded. He had all five components in his week; he just had not known there were five to check.

The count is not trivia. It is a checklist for a complete body. Our full guide to the five health-related fitness components explains how to train each one without a gym.

Where to start

Write the five components on a sticky note and put it on your bathroom mirror: cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, body composition. For the next week, give each one a single action: a 20-minute walk, ten wall push-ups, a 30-second plank, a minute of stretching, and a good night’s sleep. That is the entire five-component week.

Reviewed by Dr. Rachel Stone, MD. This article is for education, not medical advice. Always talk to a qualified provider before changing your health routine.

Your move: name the five from memory right now, before scrolling up. If you got four, you now know exactly which one your training is missing.