It s just a matter of getting out there and doing it (or in some cases, staying in and doing it), because whilst they may not cost money, they still will take effort.

No one ever said losing weight will be easy, but it can be cheap!

Workouts You Can Do For Free

1. Walking: Everyone seems to overlook this as an option for losing weight. But it is in fact a very powerful weight loss technique. Simply walking a few miles every day can help drop the pounds off in no time.

2. Jogging: The old classic that people think of when it comes to free weight loss techniques. And for a reason – it works! Personal trainers everywhere still talk about the virtues of jogging even though there are so many other options available now.

3. Yoga: These days you don’t even need to buy a yoga DVD to be able to tap into the full power of yoga as a weight loss technique. There are a huge number of free yoga videos available for you to follow online.

4. At home work outs: You can do sit ups, press ups, using the chair for body raises, using tins of beans/soup as dumb-bells for curling as you jog on the spot. There are any number of at home work outs for you to do that will help you lose weight, and all are free to use!

There are plenty more options besides these. Swimming if you live near the sea or suitable lake, step aerobics using your stairs, bunny hopping on and off a low wall. Almost the entire world can be leveraged to help give you a work out to lose weight!

We are not saying ‘eat these and you will lose weight’, it is important that they are coupled with a sensible diet and exercise regimes.

5 Foods That Will Lose You Weight

1. Spicy Foods: Eating foods that are spicy boosts the metabolism. Your metabolism dictates how quickly your body uses calories as energy – so a boosted metabolism will burn calories even when you are doing very little.

   Don’t just rush off to buy a curry though. Many spicy foods contain a lot of fattening substances. Make sure you are eating healthy spicy foods.

2. Grapefruit: The grapefruit not only gives you a useful nutrient boost but it also helps to lower the levels of insulin in your blood stream. This means that your body will be more efficient in converting calories into energy rather than fat.

3. Cucumber: Cucumbers are almost completely made out of water. They actually require more calories to break down than that contain. Whilst the nutritional value of your average cucumber is low it is a great way of eating and filling up on calorie busting food.

4. Soup: Low fat vegetable soups give a lot of food for low amounts of calories. Since your body is more interested in filling its belly than how many calories are consumed, a low fat vegetable soup can fill you up for very few calories.

5. Eggs: High protein, low fat. What more do you need?! Even healthier if eaten without the yolk, containing next to no fat.

Pilates called his method Contrology, because he believed that his method uses the mind to control the muscles. The Pilates method seeks to increase the strength, flexibility and control of the body.

Remember: If you keep consuming sugar.. say goodbye to your sixpack abs.

The thing to remember is that whenever you are trying to work your core, everything works, for a certain period of time. Everything from high reps, low reps, weighted work, bodyweight work, stability ball exercises, and BOSU ball exercises – it all works until your body adapts and says, “This is easy, I’m not going to change unless you give me a new reason to adapt.

Your ab training should be progressed from stable floor work with your body weight to a unstable surface with weighted work. Progressing to movements that will reduce your base of support as much as possible are the best ab workouts because they will call into play all the muscles within the core, especially those really deep that stable floor work can not target.

Such examples of floor ab exercises that would do this would be crunches, sit ups and leg raises. Eventually you want to do these same exercises against gravity, then a load and then on unstable surface like a stability ball. Body weight exercises like “front planks” and “side planks” should be the foundation of a core program and progressed to one arm planks in the frontal and side planes and then eventually on a stability ball or BOSU ball for further recruitment.

The best ab workouts to make your abs “pop” would be a variety of weighted movements. I’m sure you’ve skinny guys with a flat stomach but no “eye popping” abs, which is because they have not developed the actual abdominal muscle, just like every other body part. Part of getting nicely chiseled abs is going to be developing the muscles underneath the fat, and weighted ab crunches with cables or on a stability ball with a heavy dumbbell will do this best.

During all your ab workouts be sure to get a full stretch during the eccentric phase of your ab exercises. Going through an entire range of motion on the way up (if doing a crunch on the floor or ball) is not necessary, however, you should be “crunching” your upper abs onto your lower abs during each rep to maximize the burn, recruitment and full development.

The one weighted exercise you will not find in my programs is weighted side bends, as this could make you look wider in the waste, distracting from creating a lean image.

One concerning question most people have is regarding lower ab workouts, typically the most troubling spot. Yes, hip flexion (emphasis more so on lower abs) is important to perform and should be done first in the workout but the reality of the matter is that you cannot specifically separate your abs into upper and lower components. Whenever you perform any type of ab movement you should automatically be focusing on working both the upper and lower portion at the same time.

Good exercise to definitely direct a little more force into the lower area would be the progression of lying leg raises, lying leg raises on a incline and eventually hanging leg raises fully vertical. Lying leg raises on a stability pull is also an extremely challenging and advanced exercise to create razor sharp abdominals.

Finally, the last thing to consider is when you are going to perform your ab workout is training frequency. Again, generally speaking, the more the better assuming your abdominals have recovered. Whether you want to perform it at the end of your workout, before your workout, during your workout or on a day of it’s own is up to you. My ab workouts incorporate all methods depending on if you are a beginner, intermediate or advanced. Some theories of that warn you not to start with abs is because abs work as a synergistic muscle for so many of the other exercises you’ll do, if you pre-fatigue them before the start of the workout, you may not progress as much during the rest of your workout. I don’t agree with this and if you’re abs are your weakest link then they should be given first priority when you are the most fresh, the start of your workout.

Incorporating a specific ab workout is only a small part of the battle – diet, lifestyle and overall caloric expenditure through weight training and cardio are the true building blocks to creating a sexy and desired mid section.

Far too many people overlook the many health and fitness benefits that weight training has to offer, and because of this, experience problems down the road with their body such as decreased bone density, a slowed metabolic rate, increased stress levels and other negative consequences that are associated with constant stress.

Increased Bone Density

Weight lifting, being one of the best weight bearing exercises you can do, will increase your bone density and help ward off osteoporosis or stress fractures in the future.

Many people think running is the best exercise for increasing bone density, but this isn’t necessarily true. If the truth is told, running actually promotes muscle breakdown in the body, while weight lifting, being an anabolic process, helps to promote the building of tissues.

Therefore, weight lifting is going to be much better at preserving your bone mass, not to mention it’s far less impact than going for an hour run.

Decreased Frequency of Injuries

When you strength train, not only are your muscles going to get stronger, but you’ll also work the ligaments and tendons that are connecting bones, muscles, and other tissues, thus reducing the chance they become injured when participating in other physical activities.

If you’ve ever been injured, you know just how frustrating this can be. In about 80% of all injury cases, the injury is a direct result of a tendon, ligament, or muscle not being strong enough when a stressful force is applied.

Since weight training will really hit all those deep tendons and ligaments, it’s the best injury prevention out there.

Reduction of Health Related Risks

Numerous studies have demonstrated that regular weight training can have a positive effect on health by showing reductions in the rate of insulin resistance, blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer.

If you couple a solid weight training program then with a well-thought out diet, you’ll be putting your best foot forward at warding off these chronic problems

Prevention of Fat Gain

The more you weight lift, the higher your metabolism will be, thus the more food you can eat while maintaining your weight. If that isn’t good news for your future and the fight against body fat, I’m not sure what is.

Now, with all of this said, one big problem many people run into is the thinking pattern that using a muscle building program will make you big and bulky.

This is most certainly not the case.

Let’s look at an analogy to gain an understanding of this.

Pretend you have two teams and each are going to try and build a house using the exact same building technique.

One team is given 10,000 bricks to construct this house, and the second team is given only 1,000 bricks.

Who’s going to build the bigger house?

The choice should be obvious – team one since they have more bricks to build it with.

Now, think of those bricks as being the calories you put into your body. Unless you’re supplying enough calories, you aren’t going to build really big muscles. This is precisely what makes bodybuilders look like bodybuilders.

It’s not just about the way they train, but more about the way they eat (if you’ve ever had a teenage son in the growing process in your house, you likely know just how much food must be consumed when growing at rapid rates).

Whether it’s growing in height during puberty or trying to build bigger muscles later on, calories must be supplied for this growth process to take place.

You can’t build a house out of nothing. Likewise, you can workout all you want, but if those building blocks – in the form of amino acids, carbohydrates, and dietary fats are not there, you aren’t going to see too much muscle growth.

So, don’t get caught thinking that just because you add weight lifting to your workouts, you’re going to develop large bulky muscles. If you control your diet, this simply will not happen.

So, hopefully it is clear now that just because you’re weight lifting, it does not mean you will end up with bulky muscles as a result. Many people make this incorrect assumption – but it really is the diet that makes all the difference in how this weight lifting will shape your body.

When you make the decision to work with me using my 6-Pack Ab Quest program, I’ll take you through the weight lifting and ab techniques that will provide maximum results with minimal effort on your part (why spend more time in the gym than you have to?), as well as provide you with meal plans that are custom designed to ensure you get the best results from your training without the muscle bulk – in fact, the plans are formulated to help you shed the fat so you look leaner and more defined.

Not choosing to include weight training as part of your current workout program is without-a-doubt the biggest mistake you could make as far as your long-term health and fitness level is concerned. Don’t let this exercise pass you by any longer.