Bare Your Soles: Show the person behind you the soles of your feet. You'll increase your walking speed and fully engage your entire leg, from glutes to ankles.
Power Up The Stairs: Each time you go up a flight mix it up- two at a time, single steps, hands free. Bonus: taking just two more flights of stairs (up and down) daily burns 6 pounds a year, says a study from the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Take A Stand: Choose standing over sitting and you'll burn 53% more calories, says a study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Add a few isometric thigh squeezes and you'll melt even more. Tiny calorie-burn increases throughout the day can have a big impact on your overal boddy fat, says Time Church, M.D., PH.D., medical director at the Cooper Instituted in Dallas. Burn 10 more calories a day and that's a pound a year.
Go Hands Free: Whenever you stand up from your chair, make a conscious effort not to use your hands. Doing this will force you to recruit your glutes, hamstrings, and quads, says Wayne Westcott, PH.D., fitness and research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Stash Your Stilettos: Save the heels for special occasions. They slow you down by 6 percent, and the elevated position lowers the workload on yoru leg muscles by almost a third, says a study in the Turkish Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
Excerpt from Fitness Magazine, August 2005.
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