Aerobic Exercise

Walking

Benefits: Walking daily can reduce your risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and depression.
Safety: Walk in well-lit and populated areas. Choose shoes that offer good ankle support to reduce your risk for injury.
Duration and frequency: 150 minutes per week, or 30 minutes 5 days a week
If walking is your main form of exercise, aim to get 150 minutes per week. This can be broken down into 30 minutes of walking 5 days a week. Or, walk briskly for 10 minutes at a time, 3 times each day.
You can also use a fitness tracker to keep tabs on how many steps you take each day. If your goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day, start with your base (current amount you walk) and slowly up your daily step count. You can do this by increasing your daily steps by an extra 500 to 1,000 steps a day every 1 to 2 weeks.
So, once you’ve identified your base, add an extra 500 to 1,000 steps. Then, 1 to 2 weeks later, increase your daily step count by an additional 500 to 1,000 steps.

Running or jogging

Benefits: Running is one of the most effective forms of aerobic exercise. It can improve heart health, burn fat and calories, and lift your mood, just to name a few.
Safety concerns: Choose well-lit, populated running routes. Let someone know where you’ll be.
Duration and frequency: 20 to 30 minutes, 2 to 3 times per week
If you’re a beginner, run for 20 to 30 minutes twice a week. Your pace should be conversational during the run. You can alternate between 5 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking to start. To stay injury-free, always stretch after your run.

Swimming

Benefits: Swimming is a low-impact exercise, so it’s good for people prone to or recovering from an injury or living with limited mobility. It can help you tone your muscles and build strength and endurance.
Safety: Avoid swimming alone and, if possible, choose a pool with a lifeguard on duty. If you’re new to swimming, begin by enrolling in swim lessons.
Duration and frequency: 10 to 30 minutes, 2 to 5 times a week. Add 5 minutes to your swim time each week to increase your duration.
If your gym has a pool, try swimming as aerobic exercise. It’s a nonimpact workout, so it’s a good choice if you’re prone to injury. You’re also increasing your heart rate, toning your muscles, and building strength and endurance — all without adding additional strain to your body.
You can start by swimming laps using one stroke, such as freestyle. As you swim more, add additional strokes. For example, you could do 1 to 4 laps of freestyle followed by 1 to 4 laps of breaststroke or backstroke.
If you get tired, rest on the side of the pool between laps. Always follow the safety instructions and guidelines of the pool where you swim.

Stationary bike

Benefits: This low-impact exercise can help develop leg strength.
Safety: Ask a trainer at the gym for help adjusting the bike so that the seat is the correct height. This will help reduce your risk for injury or falling off the bike.
If you’re biking at home, a general rule is to adjust the bike seat height to maintain a 5- to 10-degree bend in your knee before reaching full extension. Doing so reduces compression on your knee joint. It’s not recommended to fully extend your knee while peddling on a stationary bike.
Duration and frequency: 35 to 45 minutes, 3 times per week
Riding a stationary bike is another option for low-impact cardio. Stationary bikes are a good cardiovascular workout, help you develop leg strength, and are easy to use. Many gyms and workout studios offer spin classes, which use stationary bikes. But you can still benefit from a stationary bike workout without taking a class.
After stretching and warming up by cycling at an easy rhythm for 5 to 10 minutes, increase your pace to 15 miles per hour and aim for 20 to 30 minutes of steady cycling. Cool down for 5 minutes. Stretch to finish.

Strength Exercises

Strength training — also known as weight or resistance training — is physical activity designed to improve muscular fitness by exercising a specific muscle or muscle group against external resistance, including free-weights, weight machines, or your own body weight, according to the American Heart Association.
Strength training is an important part of your overall fitness and benefits people of all ages, particularly those with health issues such as obesity, arthritis, or a heart condition.
Muscle strength is necessary for:

• All daily movement.
• To build and maintain strong bones.
• To regulate blood sugar and blood pressure.
• To help maintain a healthy weight.

To get health benefits from strength exercises, you should do them to the point where you struggle to complete another repetition.
There are many ways you can strengthen your muscles, whether it's at home or in the gym.
Examples of muscle-strengthening activities for most people include:

• Lifting weights
• Working with resistance bands
• Doing exercises that use your own body weight, such as push-ups and sit-ups
• Heavy gardening, such as digging and shovelling
• Yoga
• Pilates

Stretching Exercises

Stretching may not be the most exciting part of working out, but doing flexibility work is just as important for a well-rounded fitness routine as strength and cardio work. Incorporating some stretching exercises into your workout schedule will help you improve flexibility, reduce tightness, and ultimately, make your workouts more efficient and safe.
It's true that stretching is neither glamorous nor hardcore, and it probably won't give you the same rush that a run or HIIT class will. "It is uncomfortable and it takes time, so people don’t like to do it," Cyrelson says. "However, you can’t just do strength training and cardio without putting yourself at risk for injury and pain." By doing a ton of work that contracts the muscles (which shortens them) and never stretching (lengthening) them, your muscles will end up imbalanced. Imbalances in the body increase your risk for injury because they can cause some muscles and joints to overcompensate for other ones that are too tight to engage properly. This leads to strains and discomfort.
Also, when your muscles are loose and stretchy, they're less restricted. This allows you to move them wider a full range of motion (ROM). For example, greater range of motion in your hips and knees will allow you to sink deeper into a squat. Ultimately, having a greater ROM will make it so you're able to do more exercises—and do them properly.
Luckily, improving your flexibility and mobility isn't hard. It just takes a little time. Try adding the stretches for flexibility that Atkins demos below into your routine to help relieve muscle tension and increase mobility—so that you can move through both the gym and life more freely.

Balance Exercises

Balance exercises improve your ability to control and stabilize your body's position. This type of exercise is particularly important for older adults — as you age, your ability to know where you are in space, called proprioception, gets worse, which contributes to a decline in balance.
But balance exercises can benefit people of any age, including people who have gained or lost a lot of weight or those who become pregnant, which can throw off your center of gravity.
These exercises are also important for reducing injury risk. For example, if you sprain your ankle, you could be at risk for reinjury if you don't retrain your balance.
That's because when you sprain your ankle, the muscles around the joint stop contracting in a coordinated fashion, and this destabilizes the joint. If you do balance exercises after the injury, it retrains the muscles to contract together, which better stabilizes the joint during movements and prevents reinjury.
Examples of balance exercises include:

• Shifting your weight from side to side
• Standing on one foot
• Walking heel to toe
• Using a balance board or stability ball
• Doing tai chi, yoga or Pilates.

Benefits of doing balance exercise include:

• Prevents falls
• Reduces the risk of lower-extremity injuries, such as knee and ankle injuries
• Improves proprioception (the ability to know where you are in space)