Exercising helps you achieve or maintain a healthy weight by stoking our metabolism, utilizing and burning the extra calories. And if you exercise, your body works harder and needs more fuel. Even after you stop exercising, your body continues to burn calories at a modestly increased rate for a few hours. The more intensely you workout, the more calories you burn. By burning more calories than you take in, you can reduce body fat, giving you a healthier body composition. Losing body fat can make you look and feel better and can reduce your risk of obesity.

4. Induces Quality Sleep at Night

Many people who have problems sleeping find doing moderate exercise at least three hours before bedtime help in relaxing and sleeping better at night. The recent Hibernation Diet Theory teaches that regular exercise could activate production of recovery hormones during sleep, increases our body's metabolic rate and promotes fat-burning. It makes a powerful association between poor sleep and obesity, a disease that has been rising dramatically in developed countries and has reached epidemic levels in the United States. While most of us would associate poor weight control with aging, low metabolism rate, and poor eating habits, many other research studies have also reported and pointed to the relationship between insufficient sleep and weight gain.

So start today, get a good night's sleep, aim for eight hours a night if you can, and add resistance workouts will speed up your weight loss and the body will worker harder at night.

5. Puts You in a Better Mood

We all know that it definitely feels good to have a strong, flexible body that can do all the activities you enjoy and be able to move your arms and legs freely without feeling tightness or pain. But you may not know that exercising can actually put you in a better mood.

Exercise combats depression by activating the neurotransmitters, which are basically chemicals used by our nerve cells to communicate with one another and often associated with avoiding depression. The balance of these neurotransmitters, namely serotonin and norepinephrine plays a role in how we respond to daily events. When experiencing stress, our level of serotonin, norepinephrine or both may be out of equilibrium. Workouts may help synchronize those brain chemicals.

Exercising also stimulates the production of endorphins, another type of neurotransmitters that produce feelings of well-being, provide for "natural" pain relief, and help you relax.

Sounds good? If you just had a tough day at work and need to let off some steam, go for a workout or a brisk 30-minute walk to calm yourself down.

Well, if you have not any form of physical training for a long while and find it a pain to do so, I suggest that you start doing it 2 times a week and slowly increasing to 3 and then 5 times or more a week. You can do 10 or 15 minutes bouts of workout each time to make up a 30 minutes session a day.

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