Fitness Balls Give You a Colorful Workout
by Maia Appleby

There's a lot more that you can do besides bouncing on them! Exercise balls have become so popular that many fitness centers now offer hour-long classes using them. It may look easy, but even elite athletes are using them to make run-of-the-mill exercises more challenging.

When you use a fitness ball to do crunches, for example, you're using more than just the abdominis rectus. Many other muscles have to help out, acting as stabilizers, and this makes the exercise much more powerful and effective than if you were on a mat doing simple crunches. The same goes for an endless list of traditional exercises. The fitness ball really is a great innovation to the fitness industry.

Here are a few benefits you can get from spending a half-hour a day working with a fitness ball:

• Improve your cardiovascular fitness level and burn fat in a low impact manner. The exercises work so many muscles that your heart rate remains elevated throughout the workout, provided that you're working hard enough.

• Develop muscle tone all over. When you're training one muscle group, another is helping to maintain balance, so you become toned up pretty quickly.

• Improve your flexibility. There are some great stretches you can do - especially for your back and abdominal region. When you limber yourself up, you feel taller and thinner.

• Make yourself more graceful. Working with a fitness ball trains you to balance yourself while you're in motion, a skill that really shows in every movement you make.

• Really work your body's core. Few fitness devices offer such effective exercises to tone the deeper abdominal muscles.

• Work at your own pace, to maximize your progress. Everything you do with a fitness ball can be modified to make it more or less difficult.

Fitness balls come in a variety of sizes, to accommodate people of different heights. You don't need to buy one of each, but it's beneficial to have one larger one and one smaller-to-medium-sized one. If you're new to the whole thing and don't have access to a class, there are some great videos out there to get you started, like this one.

It doesn't take long at all to become accustomed to using fitness balls, and the benefits are amazing. If you want to do something different, this might be just what you're looking for.

Looking for a good exercise ball? Try this one: