It can be a challenge to fit exercise into your daily schedule, but the rewards are great. According to the Mayo Clinic, regular exercise improves your mood and reduces stress as well as offers significant health benefits. Devising a complete, well-rounded fitness routine involves incorporating several types of exercise into your daily workouts, all of which can be done at home.
Walking
The Mayo Clinic suggests that walking and other cardiovascular activities form the basis for any general fitness plan. Brisk walking elevates your heart rate and quickens your breathing, which increases the amount of oxygen in your blood and improves the efficiency with which your heart distributes oxygen throughout the body. Other cardio activities have the same effect but a higher risk of repetitive stress injuries or similar disadvantages, so walking is a good everyday option. It's also an exercise you can take with you. No matter where you are or how little equipment you have, you can still rely on walking as a good workout.
Yoga
The gentle stretching and poses of yoga are mild enough exercises to be done every day without concern for muscle strain or stress-related injuries. Yoga can also help strengthen your core muscles and improve your overall balance and stability. Botsford Hospital of Michigan notes that the relaxed stretching of yoga helps improve balance and flexibility and boosts overall physical fitness. Try combining intervals of yoga with strength exercises or aerobic activity to get greater variety from your workout. If you use home yoga videos or DVDs, try stretches and poses only until they begin to feel uncomfortable, and avoid injury by never pushing your muscles past the point of strain.
Strength
The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports recommends including some type of strength training in everyday workouts to keep muscles toned and working on maintaining a healthy amount of muscle mass in the body. Strength training can involve moves as simple as squeezing the fingers and flexing the arms or exercises as complex as combining full squats with dumbbell rows to add an element of resistance. Strength exercises build and maintain muscle in ways that aerobics and yoga don't, and a toned and muscular body burns more calories at rest than a body that's only been trimmed with cardio work.
Strength exercises are easy to do at a gym with weight-training and resistance equipment, but you can also do them at home with dumbbells and exercise videos or simple, self-guided moves. Ask your physician for advice on which moves to include and how to keep proper form when you do them.
Core
Exercises that target the trunk, abdominal muscles and inner core improve balance and stability and make other physical movements easier on the body. Try incorporating several repetitions of crunches, pelvic lifts and tilts or abdominal movements and breathing at the beginning or end of a workout that also includes cardio. The core exercises focus on specific muscles that cardio and strength work alone can't tackle, so they're helpful for improving spot areas and are easy to do every day. Many exercise videos include core portions, and you can study the videos to learn proper form for crunches, pushups, situps, and other core work.
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