For many years, the public has been misled by meaningless statistics, promoted mostly by armchair experts. It is time to set the record straight.

A true athlete is one who trains for physical fitness throughout his life because he enjoys it, until illness or accident incapacitate him. Even then, he does not give up easily. He may or may not become a champion. In fact, many champions are not true athletes. They have been endowed by nature with ability and ambition, but when neither serves their purpose, they drop out, retire, monetize their skills, and stop training for physical fitness.

Statistics supposedly "prove" that exercise has no bearing on life expectancy. First of all, we know of no statistics relating to true lifelong athletes. Second, it is the quality of life that counts. We have observed several cases of people who would have lived like vegetables and for much shorter time, had they given up hope and stopped exercising to the limit of their capabilities. Besides, to the same degree that statistics are meaningless for the person who gets killed in an air crash, statistics are equally meaningless for anyone who does not give up training for physical fitness. For him, it is only his OWN, SPECIFIC, case that counts.

There are some misconceptions concerning physical fitness. For example: Exercise is not for old people, "no pain, no gain", playing sports once in a while keeps you in shape, never drink during a workout, and so on. Yet, exercise is beneficial at any age, if practiced without excess. While a degree of sustained effort is necessary, "pain" does not have to be a prerequisite for "gain". Only a proper combination of exercise and nutrition helps to lose fat and build muscle. Fat and muscle are not interchangeable. In order to improve strength, flexibility, and endurance workouts without interruptions are necessary, while drinking small amounts of water keeps you hydrated, particularly when the weather is hot and humid. Practicing a sport (from the French medieval word despoii, meaning a fun-game) is not necessarily conducive to physical fitness. Many popular sports are far from being complete. True, they require physical activity and skill, yet they leave many important muscle groups unused.  The best time to exercise is the best time for you, as long as warm-up and cool-down are adequate and one does not exercise after a heavy meal. The samples of existing data are woefully small and inadequate in the vast majority of cases, yet they are used to draw sweeping generalizations. Just think how meaningful is a thousand or ten thousand sample as representing populations of several millions, even if one assumes that all other parameters, genetic and environmental, are equal. Which is far from being the case in most experiments.