Recent studies in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Preventive Medicine and other sources point to short bouts of exercise being more effective than longer ones.

“There is no question that short amounts of exercise can help you get fit, help you stay fit, and help you maintain your health,” says personal fitness coach Susie Shina, author of Sixty Second Circuits. “You can stay fit in increments as short as 4 and 5 minutes at a time.”

The best part about that is that everyone can find 5 minutes a few times a day, says Shina, owner of a mobile personal training center called Fitness 180.

“Some of these exercises can fit into a 5-minute time period at work, at your desk, waiting on line in the grocery store, even driving in your car,” says Shina. “It’s not an overwhelming task, and the benefits can be enormous.”

Source: WebMD

CBSNews.com looks at a number of iPhone apps to help you get fit, such as Yoga STRETCH:

Yoga STRETCH is like a pocket-sized yoga instructor who coaches you in 60 different moves of “Vinyasa flow” yoga. The app comes with soothing music and seems most useful for those already somewhat familiar with the moves.

Read more at CBSNews.com.

One thing you can do is to exercise:

Many researchers believe our sedentary lifestyles are the biggest cause of sleep problems in modern society. Regular daily exercise will help you to fall asleep quicker, sleep for longer and have sleep that is more restful. It is almost always advised not to exercise within three hours of bedtime.

Find a number of other natural sleep aids at ThirdAge.com.

Of the eight oils they tested, thyme and cinnamon essential oils were particularly potent.

Now, researchers at the Technological Educational Institute of Ionian Islands in Greece have found that plant oils are a powerful weapon against multi-drug-resistant staphylococcus aureas or MRSA, a bacterium that causes hospital-acquired infections and is dangerous because it frequently does not respond to a range of antibiotics.

Effemia Eriotou is a professor at the Institute in charge of the research project involving plant oils to treat multi-drug-resistant staphylococcus aureas. “We didn’t know that essential oils were going to have that a great anti-microbial activity. And it’s really amazing that they are killing all these bacteria and yeasts as well,” Eriotou said.

In laboratory experiments, the research group tested a variety of essential oils from eight plants, including thyme, basil, peppermint and cinnamon. Eriotou says they all had some anti-bacterial activity, but essential oil from thyme – a spice frequently used in Mediterranean cooking – killed almost all of the bacterium in a petri dish within an hour. Almost as effective was cinnamon oil.

Source: Moldova.org

Many experts now feel that this type of approach is not only unnecessary, but may also be harmful by tightening muscles that you are seeking to loosen.

When you stretch before exercising, your body may think it’s at risk of being overstretched. It compensates by contracting and becoming more tense. That means you aren’t able to move as fast or as freely, making you more likely to get hurt.

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Instead of stretching, many experts recommend warming up with a light jog or sport-specific exercise, like kicking for football or a few serves for tennis. That type of light movement increases the heart rate and blood flow to the muscles, warming up the body temperature.

“This allows you to approach your full range of motion, but in a very controlled way,” said Dr. Anders Cohen, chief of neurosurgery and spine surgery at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and former physician for the US Tennis Open. Cohen said elite athletes in all sports are increasingly ditching static stretching and using other warm-up techniques instead.

Source: Stuff.co.nz

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and their colleagues examined the association of different amounts of physical activity with long-term weight changes among women with an average age of 54.2 years who ate a normal diet The study involved over 34,000 women who reported their exercise and body weight at three-year intervals from 1992 to 2007. Overall, the women in the study gained an average of 2.6 kg (5.7 pounds) throughout the study. Women who were a normal weight, defined as a body mass index less than 25, were able to maintain their weight if they did either 30 minutes of intense physical activity or 60 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a day. However, for overweight or obese women, 60 minutes of moderate-intensity activity was not enough to maintain weight.

Source: HealthandAge.com

In their study, published in The Journal of Pediatrics, Guthold and her team looked at 72,845 13- to 15-year-old schoolchildren from North and South America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The children were surveyed between 2003 and 2007.

The researchers defined adequate physical activity as at least an hour of exercise (outside of gym class) at least five days a week. Children who spent three or more hours watching TV, playing computer games, or chatting with friends (aside from time in school or time spent doing homework) were classified as sedentary.

Just one-quarter of the boys and 15 percent of the girls were getting enough exercise by their definition, the researchers found. And a quarter of boys and nearly 30 percent of girls were sedentary and didn’t get enough exercise.

In every country, aside from Zambia, girls were less active than boys. In more than half of the countries in the study, less than a quarter of the boys were getting enough exercise.

The study’s authors also offer a number of suggestions for reversing this trend, including promoting physical education classes and installing more bike lanes.

Source: Yahoo! News

Skipping to the end, we find the answer:

Just enough to meet your goals. Make health your priority, and remember to get a check-up before you start a big new exercise push. Choose the activities that best fit your schedule, your budget, your abilities, and your taste. Construct a balanced program by adding the weight training, stretching, and exercises for balance that you need. Start slowly, build up gradually, and — above all — stick with it. As Yogi might have said, exercise is 50% ability and 90% persistence.

Definitely read the whole article though. It’s packed with a wide variety of information to help you meet your exercising goals and know why they are worth the effort in the first place.

As the U.S. population ages, healthcare providers are paying increasing attention to preventing falls. Injurious falls can endanger an older person’s independence, even his or her life. And the medical costs associated with them are about $19 billion a year nationwide.

Fear of falling leads some older people to believe the safest course is to move less, but inactivity will only increase the risk of falls, say geriatric-medicine experts such as Dr. Elizabeth Phelan of Harborview Medical Center’s Fall Prevention Clinic in Seattle.

Exercise geared toward maintaining lower-body strength and balance has shown to reduce the risk of falling in older adults, Phelan said. That’s one reason she tries to steer older adults away from prematurely relying on walkers, wheelchairs and motorized scooters, which can accelerate loss strength and balance.

Source: MiamiHerald.com

It does this by shortening telomeres, which is DNA that helps to protect chromosomes from damage.

The shortening of telomeres, say the researchers, limits the number of divisions cells can make and speeds up the “biological clock.” Longer telomeres slow the aging of the cardiovascular system.

The researchers measured the length of telomeres in blood samples from two groups of professional athletes — professional runners with an average age of 20 and middle-aged athletes with a history of continuous endurance exercise since their youth whose average age was 51.

The exercisers were matched by age to two groups who were healthy nonsmokers, but not regular exercisers.

Bottom line: you want to live longer? Drop and give me twenty.

Source: Sunny 100