Waking up early in the morning and doing exercises is a great way to start your day.

Exercising before anybody else is up in your household can have several short term and long-term benefits. Some short-term benefits include improvement of sleep patterns, reduced anxiety and depression due to a feeling of well-being, increased mental acuity for most of the day, increased energy levels for the day and increased calorie burning among others. The long-term effects of exercising in the morning are reduced risk of coronary heart disease, developing high blood pressure, developing type 2 diabetes, developing breast and colon cancer, obesity and having a stroke.

Most people who exercise in the morning benefit much in getting more things done in the day compared to waking up late. Even if you do not really do conventional exercises in the morning and just try to clean up the house, you are already exerting too much energy and burning calories. These simple and inexpensive exercises can help keep you trim and fit without you enrolling in some exercise training programs in gyms.

You might wonder what kinds of exercises are suitable for the early hours of the morning. You do not have to be a pro in learning the basic warm ups and stretching. You can do warm ups in repeating stretches and clutches for the first week before going out for a run or do cardiovascular exercises especially if you have not done any exercises previously, early morning or any other time. Remember, you can browse through simple and inexpensive exercise activities through the pages of magazines and Internet. You can follow through these simple exercises in keeping yourself fit and trim.

However, the best exercise there is, incomparable is waking up early in the morning and stimulate your mental powers. Positively welcoming the day is the critical part of the day. Next to optimism is your simple warm ups or stretches. Remember, there are many stretching exercises that could serve as warm ups before the main workout or training. However, using appropriate warm up exercise will help you best stimulates better functions of your body relieving tensions and lead to better feeling moving forward. With an intention to release stress and starting your day right, exercising anytime or stretching your muscles whenever there is a need will regulate your body weight and keep you from being unproductive.

Moreover, the danger of obesity is one of the primary causes of cancer and is also a cause for many illnesses. Considering the numbers of unhealthy big people in the society these times, make your resolve to go out of the sedentary lifestyle bandwagon. Do your cross country training and find time to jog in the early morning when all other people are still sleeping and while the streets are traffic-free—no traffic, less stress. The pollution level would most likely be down at this time of day compared to rush hours when people are getting to work and driving there. Supply your lungs with the early morning fresh air and embrace the day’s challenges right.

June is already here and those of us who didn't start the summer weightloss operation might be late on scedule. While the is no magic quick-fix for quality fat loss, there are few useful tips that will significantly accelerate the process. Here we go:

Training

1. Weight training: Don't leave weight training out of your program! A good weight workout has an after-burn effect up to 36 hours after the workout! 4 to 5 intense 30-minutes-workouts a week wikk keep your metabolism at 100% 24/7!

2. Use more dumbbells: no modern hi-tech gym machine beats a pair of good dumbbells. More stabilizing muscles are used in free-weight training which has a double benefit: (1) You burn more fat by using more muscles. (2) You train these small stabilizing muscles and their cooperation between each other. This way you add more quality to your workouts than just "pumping" individual muscles without teaching them teamwork.

3. Kettlebell training also showed good results for a quicker weight loss as almost all principal muscles are used in these exercises. I'd say that 30 min kettlebell exercises burn 2x to 4x more calories than even dumbbell training. There are different sizes and weights. You could even improvise and build your own "kettlebells" from stuff at hand. I have used for long time 5-liter plastic water cans which could be used for dozens of different exercises. And you can adjust the weight, too, just by adding more water!!

4. Jog/run first thing in the morning. I found out that the jogging session doesn't have to be long. Even 10-15 medium-intensity workout 30 minutes before breakfast is enough to speed up your metabolism for the whole day. Plus, you won't be as lazy to wake up and go running when you know that the workout is not as "bad".

5. Know the reason. The aim of exercing in a fat-loss plan is NOT to burn as much fat DURING the exercise, but to speed up your metabolism just enough to burn fat constantly THROUGHOUT the day, 24/7. Moderation is the key. Overdoing just destroys your  precious muscle mass that is dearer than gold while dieting: Only the muscles burn fat, nothing else. I feel pitty seeing all those peeps at the local gym spending hours at the treadmill and having worse results than me, who jogs 15 minutes in the morning and  does 25 minutes weight training 5 times a week. Be clever.

Nutrition

1. Take at least 5/6 small meals a day. Split up those large dinners. Your metabolism (if you eat the right food) speeds up after each meal. By eating small throughout the day, you'll keep that engine running non-stop! After some time you'll notice that you get hungry every 2-2,5 hours automatically. That's a good thing! This means that your metabolism is at full pull! You may notice that you eat slightly more calories a day than before. Don't worry about that. As long as you eat healthy, the few extra calories don't matter.

2. NEVER feel hungry! Don't give your body a reason to store fat. It perceives even the slightest hunger as an indication of possible starvation and will save/store more fat "for bad times" at the first possibility (cravings to eat more / eat more junk-food). This is probably the most important but largely underestimated and wrongly done thing while dieting!

3. Drink good fluids, as much as possible: Water and tea. There are around 5 different theories of whoch I know that try to explain whydrinking more water helps you with weight loss. Maybe it's a combination of them all. However, I think, the most important reason is the following: When you drink much water, your kidneys adjust to water "abundance" and don't have any reason to store much water as a reserve. And with less water under your skin, you appear "leaner". Appearances, but a good quick-fix-tip

4. Watch what you eat! There are tons of useful articles that will give you an idea what is "right" food. As a quick-fix I suggest to cut significantly on simple carbs and even complex carbs by adding much, much more fruits and veggies (fiber). Try to take the good complex-carbs before and after any physical activity and limit yourself to protein and vegetarian food n other times.

5. Guarana, green tea and coffee are good metabolism-boosters. Just use them in moderation. =)

Other

1. Keep your stress in check. Stress is known to trigger cortisol, the junk-food hormone, that destroys muscles and puts you out of equilibrium. It's pure evil!! So stay cool. Take yoga, classes, if neccesary. Go for a walk in the afternoon. Leave everything behind for sometime. Do something you like once in a while.

2. Work on your sleep patterns. It's said that fitness has 3 key elements: exercise, nutrition and rest. You need to pay attention to all three. By leaving one out, the equilibrium is broken and the process is slown down. The only tip I can give here is get enough sleep and, even more important, don't take too much sleep, which is far worse!! The most useful tip I've ever got was to wake up at the same time EVERY morning (yes, even weekends) and go to sleep when you're tired (variable time). This will keep you in a natural balance and provide you with enough rest proportional to the day's activities. In a matter of two weeks you will notice a significant power boost which, again, will help you to burn more fats off your belly.

3. Moderation and persistence is the key to success in any area of life. This is probably the most important advise I can give you. Master these and you'll master everything else! Good luck!

A poor person like me can’t afford a gym membership. Nor can I afford a trainer, who is normally provided with a gym mebership. And without a trainer there is no one around to help me with the new exercise routines and to show how it’s done, right? Actually, wrong. Internet is a great gadget. If I have a question about anything I go to my MSN list and talk to my friends about any doubts and problems I may have. Or I lookup information on other blogs, google or forums.

But what about routines that are not easily explained in words, like stretching? A big advantage of a trainer is that he can actually SHOW you how to do something. An article can only show a few pictures that are often very confusing and depressing…

But keep your head up, o bodytweaker! The great information age has arrived! Now you don’t even have to have a trainer to see how something is done right. Just look it up in video directories! God bless internet!

Jokes beside, here is a list of great video sources and some samples where you can get cool new workout ideas from:

Google Videos - a great source of videos. Doesn’t have a lot, but quite enough.

1. Golf stretching video 1 and video 2
2. A woman stretching in sitting yoga position
3. Another woman performing leg stretching on a railing
4. Lower body stretch
5. 3 women performing stretching on the beach. Hot!
6. 30 min. Video of a marathon preparation class: stretching.
7. A 4 min stretching video with expalnations. 5 star!
8. A woman performing deadsplit
9. Cycling stretching exercisses. Very useful!
10. 5 stretches routine. Rather exotic (tai-chi like) stretches. Cool!
11. Abdominal stretching to tighten up stomach

1. Beginner gymnastics stretching.
2. Angela Joyce performing back stretching. Check out her other 15+ stretching videos on the same site. On your place, I would bookmark that page. Very useful!
3. …Heck, here is a whole list of hundreds more videos: http://www.expertvillage.com/category/health-fitness.htm

1. Stretching video 1.
2. Stick stretching.
3. …wow! this flexibility inspires a lot! also check out her other videos like this one of the splits.
4. Towel stretching, a good idea.
5. …etc.

There are a lot of more videos, but I think these few are a good start and give a good idea of how a stretching routine should look like.

There are also ton of material about yoga, strength training, endurance training, etc. Just look at those websites and use their search functionalities.