1. Warm-up: Always warm up your muscles at the beginning of your exercise session to get your circulation going and to raise the temperature in your muscles. This will get your body ready for heavier exercises and help prevent injuries. Brisk walking or light calisthenics are good warm-up exercises.

2. Cardiovascular endurance exercises: These are commonly known as aerobic exercises. These exercises require a good air supply, and they do get you to breathe more rapidly and deeply, while speeding up your heart rate. Cardio exercises include fast-paced walking, jogging, running, cycling, dancing; anything that revs up your heart and makes you huff and puff a little bit. These are great for increasing your lung capacity, toning up your cardiovascular system, and burning excess fat.

3. Strengthening exercises: These exercises build and tone your muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments by forcing your body to work against some form of resistance. The resistance can come in the form of weights, gravity, water, or even another part of your own body. Strengthening exercises help your muscles increase the force they can exert (strength) and the amount of time that they can exert it (endurance). Weight lifting, leg lifts, push-ups, swimming, and isometric exercises (e.g., placing your palms together and pushing them against each other) are all examples of strengthening exercises.

4. Stretching: These exercises increase your flexibility, and your ability to bend, twist, and reach. They increase the elasticity of your muscles; extend the range of motion of your joints; and make your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints more resistant to injury. They also relieve stress, ease muscle pain, and help you to relax. The best kind of stretching is called static stretching. You get into the stretching position and hold it at your maximum stretch for 30 to 45 seconds. No bouncing (quickly pulling and releasing within the stretch) allowed! Toward the end of the 30 to 45 seconds, try to ease a little further into the stretch, hold it, and then slowly release. There are loads of great stretches for the neck, arms, sides, back, back of the legs, calves, and even the feet. Learn to stretch under the guidance of a trained professional, because you can do it incorrectly, and that can actually be worse than not stretching at all!

5. Cool down: This is the flip side of the warm-up exercises, and often you can do the very same thing. The idea is to keep moving but to decelerate so that your body gets used to the idea that it's coming in for a landing.