Lecture
The primary task of a state's social policy is to
preserve and strengthen the health of its citizens, rather than
to fight a disease that has already arisen. Indeed, the
identification, study, and mitigation of the consequences of such risk
factors as social conflicts and socio-psychological tension, stress, and psychological
discomfort — which affect more than 70% of the population
— lie outside the professional domain of medicine. Here, what
is mainly needed are effective means of relieving socio-psychological tension
and of preventing and mitigating conflicts and psychological stress, among
which are engagement in physical culture, sport, and tourism. The
human being is the highest stage of the development of
biological evolution, an element of living nature and of the
social life of the human community; a person is a
biosociocultural system whose uniqueness is determined by the fusion of
the natural, innate features of the individual with those acquired
in the course of development and under the influence of
the social environment. Pedagogical and biomedical sciences deal with the
human being as a creature that is biological but also
social. Sociality is the specific essence of the human being,
one that does not abolish his biological substance, since the
biological origin of a person is a necessary condition for
the formation and manifestation of a social way of life
[25]. The socio-biological foundations of physical culture are the principles
of the interaction of social and biological regularities in the
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process by which a person assimilates the values of physical
culture. The natural-science foundations of physical culture are a complex
of biomedical sciences (anatomy, physiology, biology, biochemistry, hygiene, and others).
Labor and the influence of the social environment in the
course of the development of humankind have shaped the biological
features of the body of modern human beings and their
surroundings. The body is influenced by various natural factors: 1.
changes in air temperature; 2. humidity; 3. the level of
solar radiation; 4. rain; 5. snowfall; 6. earthquakes, and so
on. The study of human organs and interfunctional systems is
based on the principle of the integrity and unity of
the organism with the external natural and social environment. The
organism is a coordinated, unified, self-regulating and self-developing biological system,
whose functional activity is determined by the interaction of mental,
motor, and vegetative reactions to environmental influences, which can be
either beneficial or harmful to health. Under minor changes in
living conditions, the organism restructures its functions. Adaptation to the
new conditions occurs. For example, when air temperature rises, breathing,
heart activity, and sweating intensify. As it adapts, the organism,
receiving more heat from the environment, also releases more of
it. In this way, a relative constancy of body temperature
is maintained. Thanks to the living conditions people have created
for themselves (constant sources of heat, water, and energy, housing,
clothing, and transport), a human being can adapt to unfavorable
factors of the natural environment better than other living organisms,
and can create means of protection against them. Being part
of nature and the living world, a human being interacts
with it. The relationship between humans and nature is the
most pressing problem of contemporary society. Not only the present
state of health of the Earth's population but also the
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future of humanity depends on it. The development of science
and technology has expanded the spheres of people's economic and
productive activity, pushed back the boundaries of their settlement, and
increased the scale of the exploration of space, the world's
oceans, and deserts. In new natural conditions, people experience the
influence of unusual environmental factors on their general condition, well-being,
and working capacity. Being in such conditions often requires additional
expenditure of energy. The adaptation of the organism to climatic
conditions is called acclimatization. During acclimatization, a person feels better
in the new conditions. A person's adjustment to new productive
(work-related) and everyday conditions is called adaptation. In this process,
the accuracy and quantity of the work operations performed increase,
which is connected with an improvement in the regulation of
the processes taking place within the organism. The biological possibilities
for human adaptation to various conditions are great. In this
process, metabolism, nervous processes, and the psyche are partly restructured,
and motor reactions change (for example, under weightlessness). The formation
and improvement of various morphophysiological functions and of the organism
as a whole depend on their capacity for further development,
which is largely genetic (innate) in basis and is especially
important for achieving both optimal and maximal indicators of physical
and mental working capacity. It should be noted that the
capacity to perform physical work can increase many times over,
but only up to certain limits, whereas mental activity has
virtually no limits to its development. Every organism possesses certain
reserve capacities. The features of the morphofunctional state of the
body's various systems, formed as a result of motor activity,
are called the physiological indicators of fitness. The activation of
the body's physiological functions during muscular activity should be regarded
as the mobilization of reserves. In this process, a trained
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organism has larger reserves and can make fuller use of
them than an untrained one [14]. A person who systematically
engages in physical culture and sport bears the hardships of
life 2-3 times more easily, is 15-20% more proactive at
work and in the community's social life, provides more help
to their colleagues, has heightened creative activity and sociability, is
more self-confident, and strives to achieve better results whether in
production, social activity, or study. Physical culture as a cultural
phenomenon cannot be reduced to natural phenomena, to a person's
physical qualities, to the properties of their organism, or to
biological life-support systems; a person's physicality is a basic characteristic
of the human being, but their spirituality and intellect are
inseparable from the person and from their physical culture. The
development of the organism occurs throughout all periods of its
life (from the moment of conception to the end of
life). This development is called individual development, or development in
ontogenesis. Two periods are distinguished here: the intrauterine period (from
conception to birth) and the extrauterine period (after birth). Every
person, once born, inherits from their parents innate, genetically determined
traits and features that largely determine individual development over the
course of their subsequent life. Human growth continues until approximately
age 20. The increase in body weight occurs almost in
parallel with the increase in height and stabilizes by age
20-25. Over the past 100-150 years, a number of countries
have observed earlier morphofunctional development of the body in children
and adolescents. This phenomenon is called acceleration, and it is
associated not only with faster growth and development of the
organism in general, but also with an earlier onset of
puberty and accelerated development of sensory and motor coordination and
mental functions. Therefore, the boundaries between age periods are fairly
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arbitrary, which is connected with significant individual differences, whereby "physiological"
age and "chronological" age do not always coincide. The vital
activity of the organism is based on the process of
the automatic maintenance of vitally important factors at the necessary
level, any deviation from which leads to the immediate mobilization
of mechanisms that restore this level (homeostasis). Homeostasis is a
set of reactions that ensure the maintenance or restoration of
a relatively dynamic constancy of the internal environment and of
certain physiological functions of the human organism (circulation, metabolism, thermoregulation,
and others). This process is provided by a complex system
of coordinated adaptive mechanisms aimed at eliminating or limiting factors
that affect the organism from both the external and internal
environment. They make it possible to maintain the constancy of
the composition and of the physicochemical and biological properties of
the internal environment, despite changes in the external world and
physiological shifts arising in the course of the organism's vital
activity. Under normal conditions, fluctuations in physiological and biochemical
constants occur within narrow homeostatic limits, and the body's
cells live in a relatively constant environment, since they
are bathed by blood, lymph, and tissue fluid. The
constancy of the physicochemical composition is maintained through the
self-regulation of metabolism, circulation, digestion, respiration, excretion, and other
physiological processes. The organism is a complex biological system.
All its organs are interconnected and interact with one
another. A disruption in the activity of one organ
leads to a disruption in the activity of others.
An enormous number of cells, each performing functions unique
to itself within the overall structural-functional system of the
organism, are supplied with nutrients and the necessary amount
of oxygen so that the vitally necessary processes of
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energy production, the removal of breakdown products, and the
provision of the various biochemical reactions of vital activity
can take place. These processes occur owing to regulatory
mechanisms that carry out their activity through the nervous,
circulatory, respiratory, endocrine, and other systems of the organism.
1. Explain why the human organism is regarded as a unified,
self-developing, self-regulating biological system. 2. Consider what the effect of
natural and socio-ecological factors on the organism and vital activity
of a person consists of. 3. List the concepts you
have studied. 4. Give a characterization of each of them.
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