Eric Heiden

I grew up during the 1950s and '60s in Madison, WI, in a family that lived and breathed sports, and I don't mean watching sports. We played sports, outdoors: hockey, cycling, tennis, hiking, golf. My grandparents lived on a lake so we were always...

When I was speed skating, we cross-trained year-round by lifting weights a couple of times a week. I found weight lifting so satisfying that even today, no matter how busy my schedule gets, not a week goes by that you won't find me out in the garage...

Even people with risk factors need exercise. In fact, people with risk factors stand to see the greatest gains from regular exercise, including a potential reduction in the very risk factors they once viewed as an impediment to it. According to...

Jen had been obese, had gastric bypass surgery and lost 80 pounds. She was walking five or six times a week — about 25 miles — and had started doing marathons. Then she started lifting weights twice a week to add some resistance training to...

There are certain places you might expect to see a recommendation to hire a personal trainer — say, in a muscle-magazine ad or on late-night TV. But one of those places is probably not a publication by one of our nation's most venerated medical...

More and more kids are being diagnosed with what was once thought to be an almost exclusively adult malady: high blood pressure. These children join the large contingent of American adults — estimated to be 25 percent of the population — who...

Flat abs and bulging biceps are improvements brought on by exercise. Less visible but more significant are the structural improvements aerobic exercise make to your heart—improvements that can take you from feeling like a junker car to purring...

The vast majority of fitness-seekers, even those who are quite knowledgeable, have no idea how to properly gauge their body composition — how much of their body weight is fat and how much is muscle — which is so important to truly measuring...

Balance rarely receives a lot of attention, but it's one of the four key components of fitness (the remaining being aerobic ability, strength and flexibility). A person who is fit is strong in all of these areas. You may wonder why balance plays such a...

I've always enjoyed exercising outdoors, but I can't deny that working out indoors also contributed a great deal to my best performances. Today, gym workouts are as much a matter of convenience as anything, especially right now, when the days are short...

I like the convenience of working out at home. The upside is that once you eliminate the travel time to a gym, a lot more opportunities to exercise open up. The downside is that, 90 percent of the time, those opportunities never seem ideal for one...

The link between learning and exercise is now well established. As kids return to the classroom this fall, and as more parents discover that school recess and P.E. have been cut back or eliminated entirely, families are making exercise an after-school...