Get Some Sleep
By Steve Edwards

About 40% of adults experience sleeplessness that interferes with their daily lives. Most U.S. adults get less than seven hours of sleep per night during the workweek. Sleep does more than make you feel rested. Lack of sleep affects your mood, as well as your cognitive and motor skill abilities. Two recent studies demonstrated a substantial drop in the body's immune system function after only a modest reduction of sleep. But following a good night's sleep, most immune functions went back to normal levels. So try and keep those times you're burning the candle at both ends down to when they are absolutely necessary.

Cardio or Weights First?
By Steve Edwards

It depends on your individual goals, because you always want to work on your objective first. If your goal is to lose weight and be more cardiovascularly fit, you should do cardio first. If your goal is more muscle building, hit the weights first. But if your goal is simply overall body conditioning, you can combine the two in a circuit training routine. While that might compromise performance at the upper range of the scale, it's a combination that is quick, efficient, and provides more than enough gains in both areas simultaneously.

Face Exercises
By Denis Faye

 The face has muscles just like the rest of your body, so make sure to keep your mug fit to prevent sagging. The first exercise you can do is to laugh more often. Once you've mastered that, here's a little exercise to help tighten the neck and throat and lessen, or prevent, double chins.

Look to the sky, stretching out your neck. Now, stick your tongue out as far as it will go and wiggle it around. After just a few seconds, you can actually feel the muscles working in your neck/throat. Do this for a minute a day. If you do it in public, you might actually make a few new friends.

5 Tips to Prevent Muscle Soreness
By Steve Edwards

When going through any exercise program, you will have some muscle soreness no matter what you do, but if you follow these tips you can keep your soreness to a minimum:

Start Your Program Slowly. Don't go too hard on day 1 after you've had a layoff. Stop before you're completely wiped out.

Warm Up. Always take 5 to 10 minutes to warm up thoroughly.

Stretch After. Always stretch at the end of your workout—5 to 10 minutes spent will do wonders for your recovery time.

Have a Post-Exercise Snack. A snack that is 4 parts carbs to 1 part protein can speed recovery by 26%.

Self-Massage. Spend 5 minutes massaging yourself each night. A professional massage is better, of course, but not nearly as practical. Spend 5 minutes and you'll sleep better and recover quicker.

5 Ways to Prevent Injury

By Steve Edwards

Do 5 to 10 minutes of low-intensity cardio before exercise or stretching to properly warm up—enough to break a slight sweat.

Listen to your body. When it sends a pain signal, that means stop; something is not right.

Maintain a balanced exercise regimen, training muscles on both sides of the body equally.

Never train so hard or heavy that proper form is lost. When you lose form, stop.

Take a recovery week between each 4 to 6 weeks of hard training. The harder you train, the more rest you need.

Work Your Transverse Abdominus for a Flatter Stomach
By Steve Edwards

 Most abdominal exercises do not work the transverse abdominus because it is an internal muscle with fibers that run horizontally. Why work it if you can't see it? Because it gives your torso stability, making other exercises more efficient and helping prevent injury. It also holds your gut in, essentially flattening your stomach. The transverse abdominus aids in forced expiration, which means your work it every time you breathe out forcefully while completing squats, deadlifts, and other heavy exercises. A good way to work your transversus is by doing a simple movement called a "vacuum" exercise. To do this, exhale forcefully, suck in your gut (contracting it so that it's smaller), and hold it for a couple of seconds. You may do this exercise as much as you like as there is very little chance of incurring an overtraining effect from it.

Treadmill Technique
By Steve Edwards

Holding the side rails on a treadmill reduces the intensity, so you are not burning as many calories as the display indicates. Holding the front rail so it pulls you along is worse yet. Hold the rails lightly for balance until you get used to the machine, then work toward letting your arms swing naturally.

No Time to Work Out? Work Out Anyway!
By Steve Edwards

Even if it's just for 10 minutes, you will absolutely benefit by elevating your heart rate. While this may not transform the way you look, 10 minutes is plenty long for your body to elevate its metabolism instead of staying in couch-potato mode. If you know that you're going to have a busy day, try to plan ahead. You want to elevate your heart rate, but not sweat too much. Try walking briskly to each destination that day—up the stairs to work, out to lunch, to the next meeting, etc. This will require enough planning to make sure you've got proper footwear for the day. If you have some other downtime, use it to stretch. Brisk walking on pavement can make your muscles tight, but a few minutes of sporadic stretching can do wonders.

Seasonal Weight Training
By Steve Edwards

If you are an athlete in a seasonal sport, try to schedule some weight training even during the season. Doing just your sport may create muscular imbalances and you may lose strength over the course of the season. Keep these sessions minimal, as hard training will break you down further than your sport already does. One set of 15 to failure, per body part, once per week, should be enough for maintenance during the season.

Tip of the Week: Exercise for Charity
By Steve Edwards

Combining a charitable event with your fitness goals can be a great way to keep you motivated and put a little pressure on yourself to see a program through to the end. Since any race or competition has only one person that will cross the finish line first, this is a way that we can find our own challenge and a way to "win" the competition. Most participants are not world-class athletes, so the desire to run a 10K or do a triathlon is a personal challenge. Fund-raising is a way to heighten that challenge. And it's also a great way to keep yourself motivated so that you don't give up on your own fitness objectives. You can easily parlay your personal quest into a philanthropic event. By tying a charitable event to your fitness goals, you add a "bigger than you" aspect that provides extra incentive to keep going during periods when you lose steam.

The Gift of Fitness
By Steve Edwards

With the holidays knocking on the door, how about giving the gift of fitness this year? Of course, you might want to avoid giving people you care for gym memberships, the Fat Flush Plan, or other indicators that you might consider them overweight. Instead, how about an entry to a race, an organized bike tour, hike tour, or other event that will prompt them to get into shape? Instead of telling them they're fat, you're giving them a fun life experience—the upside is that they'll need to get into shape in order to experience it best.

Going Up?
By Steve Edwards

If you run or walk for fitness, make sure to mix some hills into your workouts. Hills not only offer the added benefit of challenging you and making your heart beat faster, but moving on an incline works your muscles differently, giving you a more well-rounded workout.

Live somewhere devoid of hills? Try stairs or the local football stadium.

Are You Overtraining?
By Steve Edwards

Chronic overtraining is just as bad as not training enough and can lead to injury and/or illness. If you suspect you are overdoing it, try this. Get in the habit of taking your morning resting heart rate before getting out of bed. If it goes up and stays up for two or three days, you are either starting to get sick or overtraining. In either case, it's time to back off until your heart rate drops back down.

Measuring your Fitness Level
To measure your fitness, try checking the time it takes your heart rate to return to its resting value after strenuous exercise. After your cool down, check your heart rate, and again after one minute. Your heart rate should fall by about 12 beats per minute. The quicker the better, usually reaching your normal daily activity rate between one and three minutes. If it takes longer, you have room to improve.

Correct Way to Breathe During a Crunch
By Steve Edwards

During your crunches it's important to breathe correctly for maximum benefit. As you begin, exhale as you contract your abdominal muscles, making your core area smaller. Resist the temptation to push the stomach muscle out. Think small. On the way down, inhale deeply, expanding the abdominal area.

Breathe
By Steve Edwards 

You've probably heard about the importance of breathing over and over again, as not many fitness instructors fail to mention the fact that if you don't breathe, you'll pass out, and eventually die, leading to a serious decline in your results department. But besides just making sure that you aren't holding your breath while you work out, sometimes it's beneficial to actually switch your entire focus onto just your breathing. During a workout, especially as lactic acid builds up in your system, you may not only to forget to breathe but to breathe effectively (i.e., start to gasp). So a few times per workout, focus on taking a few exaggerated long, slow breaths. This will lower your heart rate a few bpm's and bring your mind back into focus.