5 of the best exercises you can ever do If you're not an athlete or serious exerciser — and you just want to work out for your health or to fit in your clothes better — the gym scene can be intimidating and overwhelming. What are the best exercises for me? How will I find the time? Just having to walk by treadmills, stationary bikes, and weight machines can be enough to make you head straight back home to the couch.  Get your copy of Starting to Exercise   What can improve your mood, boost your ability to fend off infection, and lower your risk for heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and colon cancer? The answer is regular exercise. It may seem too good to be true, but it's not. Hundreds of studies demonstrate that exercise helps you feel better and live longer. Starting to Exercise answers many important questions about physical activity. It will also help guide you through starting and maintaining an exercise program that suits your abilities and lifestyle. Yet some of the best physical activities for your body don't require the gym or ask you to get fit enough to run a marathon. These "workouts" can do wonders for your health. They'll help keep your weight under control, improve your balance and range of motion, strengthen your bones, protect your joints, prevent bladder control problems, and even ward off memory loss. No matter your age or fitness level, these activities are some of the best exercises you can do and will help you get in shape and lower your risk for disease:  For additional information on this and other questions about getting started on a healthy exercise program, read Starting to Exercise, a Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School. Image: Bigstock Share this story:

Exercise and weight loss: A formula for success The pleasure of eating a candy bar lasts but a few minutes. Burning off the calories it delivers can take nearly an hour. So this is definitely not a simple way to lose weight! To lose one pound by exercising, you need to burn approximately 3,500 calories. It can take days of moderate exercise to do this. A better strategy for weight loss involves a two-pronged approach: exercising and cutting calories. Although exercise by itself isn't the fast track to weight loss, it does offer important benefits beyond cancelling out calories. It slightly increases the rate at which you burn calories even when you're not working out. And pounds lost through boosting your activity level consist almost entirely of fat, not muscle. Do the math for this simple way to lose weight Start with this number: 3,500. That's how many calories are stored in a pound of body fat. With that number, you can tally up how much weight you can lose through increasing activity, cutting calories, or both. Walking or jogging uses roughly 100 calories per mile. (Precisely how many calories you'll burn depends on a number of things, including your weight and how fast you walk.) So you'd lose about one pound for every extra 35 miles you walk — provided you don't change anything about your current food intake or other activities. If you walk briskly (at a pace of 4 miles per hour) for 30 minutes on five out of seven days, you'll log 10 miles a week. That means it would take three-and-a-half weeks to lose one pound if the number of calories you consume stays the same. If you altered your diet and cut back by 250 calories a day (½ cup of ice cream or two sugar-sweetened sodas), you'd lose a pound in two weeks. If you ate 250 fewer calories a day and walked for 30 minutes a day, it would take just over a week to lose one pound. Reducing calorie intake even more and exercising more would further speed the process. For doable exercises that will produce results, read Starting to Exercise, a Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School. Image: Bigstock Share this story:

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Starting to Exercise Featured content: • What can exercise do for you? • Should you talk to a doctor first? • Getting started: What type of exercise should you do? • The workouts   • Designing your own program   Click here to read more »