At 55, the Oscar-winning star of such films as Malcolm X and Training Day follows a workout routine that would tire out most men half his age. Washington does 10 rounds of boxing five days a week — a good exercise that combines strength training and aerobic exercise, helping to build muscles and burn fat at the same time. If you’d like to try a boxing workout, a boxing gym is a good place to start.

When you exercise, your heart speeds up to meet your body's energy needs. If you know your target heart rate, you can make sure you're exercising hard enough to get a good workout, but not too hard to strain your heart.

Why do we like to listen to tunes when we exercise? Psychologist Tom Stafford searches for answers within our brains, not the muscles we are exercising.

Perhaps you have a favourite playlist for going to the gym or the park. Even if you haven't, you're certain to have seen joggers running along with headphones in their ears. Lots of us love to exercise to music, feeling like it helps to reduce effort and increase endurance. As a psychologist, the interesting thing for me is not just whether music helps when exercising, but how it helps.

It is 5:00 in the morning and my alarm clock reminds me that my most important daily ritual is just an hour away. I get out of bed knowing that hitting the snooze button on the clock is not an option. Down the street there is another person also waking up to keep our plans to hit the pavement running as the sun comes up and the birds start to sing.

What started out as morning walks has progressed to far more than a ten-minute mile. It has become friendship, laugher, endurance, an educational forum and a time to share whatever thoughts might come to mind. It has become what we now refer to as "run therapy".

Winter, spring, summer, fall, rain, shine, or even snow, the ritual for us AM warriors happens regardless of the conditions outside.

Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe’s roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex’d climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete.

Americans are living longer, with our average life expectancy now surpassing 78 years, up from less than 74 years in 1980. But we are not necessarily living better. The incidence of a variety of chronic diseases, like diabetes and heart disease, has also been growing dramatically, particularly among people who are not yet elderly.

Pumping weights five times a week can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes by a third and if combined with aerobic exercise can curt the risk by almost 60 per cent, a study has found.

Even small amounts of weight training had an effect on type 2 diabetes, it was found, which is important for those people who cannot cope with aerobic exercise, the authors said.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, was a French aristocrat with an enormous waxed mustache that hung on his face like a rogue accent mark. In 1914, the baron announced that he had designed a symbol for the 20th anniversary of the Games. “This,

(Reuters) - Men have a greater number of knee ligament injuries than women, despite research suggesting that women's knees are more prone to anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears and surgeries to fix them, according to a Swedish study.

The report, published in the American Journal of Sports medicine, counted the injuries across the entire Swedish population, not just among players of particular sports or in certain regions.

His palms were sweating. He needed a towel to dry his grip. A glass of ice water quenched his thirst, but hardly cooled his intensity. The Astroturf he was sitting on was as hot as the competition he faced today at the National Junior Olympics. The pole was set at 17 feet. That was three inches higher than his personal best. Michael Stone confronted the most challenging day of his pole-vaulting career.

When you think of yoga flexibility, relaxation and maybe meditation come to mind. The application of yoga as a system of healing rarely enters the Western mind. Despite today's widespread reliance on Western medicine (drugs), yoga has been used for thousands of years for concerns like high blood pressure (HBP), a condition the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) calls "The Silent Killer".

Sometimes your biggest weakness can become your biggest strength. Take, for example, the story of one 10-year-old boy who decided to study judo despite the fact that he had lost his left arm in a devastating car accident.

The boy began lessons with an old Japanese judo master. The boy was doing well, so he couldn't understand why, after three months of training the master had taught him only one move.

"Sensei," the boy finally said, "Shouldn't I be learning more moves?"

Keysi Fighting Method (KFM) is a method of self defense that is based on natural fighting instincts and several street fighting techniques, developed by Justo Diéguez Serrano from his fighting experiences in the streets of Spain. The system was founded with the help of Andy Norman. Both founders, Justo Diéguez and Andy Norman, are certified Jeet Kune Do instructors under Dan Inosanto. The Keysi Fighting Method became famous after it was used in the fighting choreography of the movies Batman Begins and its sequel, The Dark Knight.