Fitness article: Want to Lose Weight With Exercise - Start Slowly at Home With an Exercise DVD

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The biggest reason that most exercise programs fail is that peoples' expectations are too high. After living a mostly sedentary lifestyle for a number of years, believing that you can jump right into a strenuous exercise program requiring 20 to 30 minutes of hard, high-impact exercise several days a week is just not realistic. After a day or two of suffering through that kind of body torture, and the pain that comes with it, most people abandon the effort.

The best way to start any exercise program is to realize that there's no way you're going to loose 10 pounds and 5 inches overnight, and to start your new program slowly, with an avid at-home exercise program, complete with an instructional DVD. With an exercise DVD, you have the option to stop or pause the instruction whenever needed. If an exercise is difficult or confusing, you can replay that portion of the DVD over and over, until you figure it out.

If even the beginner's exercises are too advanced for the first week or so, you can choose to do just a portion of the DVD exercise program, increasing to the full program as you feel comfortable and gain strength and flexibility.

Another benefit of beginning your exercise program at home with a DVD instructor is that you can choose the most convenient time to exercise. At many gyms, classes for beginners are only offered once a day, or worse yet, once a week, and manipulating your own tight schedule to suit the gym's class time may be frustrating, if not impossible, to do. With the flexibility of a personal exercise DVD you can opt to exercise in the morning, before work, after lunch, in the evening or even in the middle of the night

As with any fitness plan, it is best to start where you actually are. Don't kid yourself that after not exercising since high school and years of getting no more exercise than clicking the remote control you'd still be ready to jump into a daily routine, starting off with a 45-minute high-impact exercise DVD.

Get your doctor's advice before beginning any exercise plan and start slowly, building up to working through the entire DVD, one session at a time. Also, take care in choosing the kind of exercise DVD that will work best for you. Begin by choosing simple stretching or isometric exercises, which promote muscle growth and weight loss without having a jarring, painful or stressful affect on the body.

Be realistic, and don't expect to see a dramatic difference in the way you look in the first days after beginning the program. Remember that it took years to get this far out of shape and getting back into shape will not happen overnight. The unrealistic desire for instant success is part of the reason people set their exercise goals too high and fail. Then the frustration (and often pain, from over-doing it) set in and they go back to completely sedentary lifestyles.

A much better option is to begin slowly, at home, where there's no one else to impress or to keep up with. An exercise DVD designed with these things in mind is the perfect way to lose the weight you hate without hurting the body you love.

About the author of Want to Lose Weight With Exercise - Start Slowly at Home With an Exercise DVD

Owner of IsoBreathing Inc. and creator of IsoBreathing(R) Ellen has been teaching life style and fitness over 20 years and is a certified fitness practitioner and personal trainer. Find out about Isometric Exercise, Weight Loss Exercise or buy her Exercise DVD - visit http://www.isobreathing.com.