“If you have a body, you have a gym…”

Gyms are great, but not essential. I love them and you can really benefit from using one, but you can also get amazing results from body-weight workouts, running, cycling and all sorts of outdoor activities.

What’s the best exercise to do?

The best exercise is the one you do most consistently. Love running? Great, that will help you build endurance, burn some calories and improve your cardiovascular health.

Maybe you could incorporate some sprints into your workouts if you love running and hate the gym.

An important point….

Building muscle is a very effective way to stay healthy. Muscle helps protects joints, ligaments, tendons and makes bones stronger.

Muscle is also metabolically active (unlike fat) which means that it uses energy just sitting there. So build muscle and you will burn calories just sitting around.

Winner, winner, let’s have more chicken for dinner!

Build more muscle

Building muscle is also energy expensive, which is ideal for losing weight. When you lift a heavy object and your muscles are loaded, they will get tiny tears in them and then over the coming days they will grow back bigger. That’s how you get larger, stronger muscles.

Doing this outside of a gym without any resistance to use is more difficult. You can do certain exercises, like single leg, single arm movements, chin-ups, adapted press-ups, etc to achieve a similar result but it’s not quite the same.

If you want to get lean and have a great physique using resistance machines or free weights is important. A gym membership even in central London can be as little as £20 a month. It’s a small investment for the return you get.