Beginner Exercises

Walking is often a good place to start, for people not already used to exercise. You can use hills to increase the intensity if you need to. When you are ready you can alternate walking and jogging, eventually the jogging portions run together and *poof* you are a runner.

Read about target heart rate--how to use it to guide exercise intensity to achieve your goals. While I don't recommend necessarily buying a heart rate monitor (a food scale is a more important initial purchase), the Wahoo heart rate monitor website has a really good write-up of how to use heart-rate to guide your training. It's a marketing write-up though, so you have to mentally de-spin the sales-pitch portions. I suggest reading about target heart rate from several sources though.

In general, for fat loss you will want to do some kind of "aerobic" exercise, such as walking, running, swimming, paddling--things that raise your heart rate and make you sweat, and that you can sustain for 20 minutes at a time. That may sound like a lot but if you are using target heart rate you will find that the intensity is low enough that you can go for a pretty long time without burning out. Start off at an intensity that puts your heart rate in the "fat burning zone".

Once you are comfortable with exercising, you can read about interval training and start adding exercise at an intensity in your "cardio" heart-rate zone. But you can defer this for now.

The other concern is for preserving muscle mass while you are eating at a calorie deficit to lose fat. Most people work to maintain or build muscle mass by lifting weights. You need work a muscle group only once or twice a week. More than that can result in over-training and a loss in strength. Some people will do their entire body in a session, some prefer to do upper body or lower body only and alternate days. Both ways are effective--pick what best fits your overall time schedule.

The best way to learn how to use weights is to join a gym that gives you basic instruction in their weight machines when you join, or to hire a personal trainer for one to two sessions only to teach you to use free-weights. Use books for reference so you don't forget how to do free weights, but its safest to learn first from a real person. Keep a paper logbook of your weight work-outs with you in the gym and write entries as you complete each exercise, so you don't forget what weight or reps you did.

You are 19--if you are in college or junior college, find out what services the college gym offers, it's likely to be less expensive than a private gym. There may also exist a weight-training PE (kinesiology) class.

add: many sedentary people first starting exercise have especially sticky or even stinky sweat. This is a temporary phase that generally goes away after a month or two of consistent exercise, and sweat becomes more watery and takes much longer to generate any scent. Your sweat glands are out of shape too! So don't let "I hate sweating" deter you from exercising.

What's your current fitness level? How far can you run without stopping? If you can't run can you walk? Can you do push-ups, pull ups?

oh--yoga is also good for flexibility and de-stressing. At higher levels it can also have some strength and aerobic benefits but most people stay at less challenging levels. If you have time for it, add it to whatever else is in your exercise program.

Anything that forces your body to continually adapt physically. You must follow the rules of physiologically adaptation. Read the following article:

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/drobson87.htm