It is time to take your life in your own hands and do something about your weight. Diets are hard and might not even work. The best thing to do is exercise, along with a generally healthier lifestyle. You could lose weight and become much more at easy with your body. Here are some tips that will help.

A great way to stay fit is to take periodic pictures of yourself. By looking at pictures of yourself, you’ll be able to track your progress and they’ll also keep you motivated. You can also share these pictures with others to help motivate them in their fitness goals.

Make sure you remember to stretch daily. Stretching is especially important before you begin exercising. Limbering up will lessen your chances of pulling a muscle or injuring yourself. It also keeps you flexible and better prepares the rest of your body for the workout that is about to come.

To stay fit, forget the phrase, “No pain, no gain!” This phrase is absolutely untrue! If you do a workout that causes you to suffer, you will be highly unlikely to continue to do it consistently. Instead of choosing exercise routines and forms of exercise that cause you distress, choose activities that you enjoy and want to do. Consistency is far more important in pursuing, attaining, and maintaining fitness than intensity.

To get the most out of your cardio workout, try interval training. Go as fast as you can for two minutes, and then rest for a minute. By moving your heart rate up and down like this, your workout is maximized, which means those calories are getting burned quicker than ever.

Don’t exercise on a day when you aren’t feeling well, or haven’t had much sleep. If you do, you’ll find that your workout isn’t as satisfying because you won’t be able to put 100% of yourself into your routine. Take a break and return to exercise when you’re feeling better.

To successfully catch a pass in football, try shaking up your defender. What you need to do is run close to the defender. The closer you are to them, the easier you can get it and run past them. Try shorter strides to run faster when you start getting close to them so that you can really speed past them when you catch it.

Instead of just running and running to try and build up your running speed, you should try some sort of weight training. Recent studies have shown that any type of resistance training will reduce the lag on your body and will actually allow your body to move forward faster.

Exercise when your mood is bright. When you are in a really good mood, take the time to go exercise. The better you are feeling, the more you will likely push yourself. Exercising can also help you feel better than you already do, so going when you feel good is only going to make you feel even better.

Cut your running schedule in half occasionally. Overdoing it is never a good idea for your body, so every few months, take an entire week to halve your running schedule. You will give your body ample time to recover without losing any of the endurance or speed you gained earlier.

Create a stronger core by doing sit-ups the proper way. You can get a better range of motions with sit-ups, thus making your abdominal muscles work more productively. It is important that you not anchor your feet while doing these because it can cause lower back distress, which will lessen your ability to continue.

Make sure that in the initial stages of planning your fitness routine to level off your expectations. If you set your goals too high, you will be putting yourself in a position for a letdown, which could reduce the motivation that you have and curtail the goals that you want to achieve.

A great tip that you can apply to your workouts in order to achieve a physically fit body is to stretch your muscles in between sets of exercises. It is ideal that you take 20 to 30 seconds to stretch the muscles that you have worked. Researchers found that this increases strength by 20 percent.

Examine your exercise routine to see if it is meeting all of your fitness needs. A well-rounded fitness regiment has three components: strength, cardio and flexibility training. Meeting all of these needs is not difficult. You simply need to begin and end your training sessions with proper stretching, as well as, alternate strength and cardio training workouts.

One little improvement you can make to your overall fitness level is to stop being passive when you watch TV. Lots of low to moderate-impact cardio exercises can be done in front of the television without demanding much of your attention. You can do even tougher exercises during the commercial breaks, too.

Keep records of your workout results. When you start a workout routine take your measurements and write them down. Every four weeks do the measurements again. You will be surprised at what you see and it will also give you the motivation that you may need to reach your end goal.

With these tips, you should be able to start working out every week. Keep track of how much weight you lose if you need something to motivate you. You should see a difference in how you look at yourself: perhaps you could even get new clothes and meet new people thanks to your confidence.