For this week's featured exercise, Melanie Douglass shows one of her favorite exercises for toning up your legs and glutes.

Portion sizes in America have been expanding for years, as have Americans' waist lines.  Reading labels and counting calories is a good way to keep your calorie intake in line, but a lot of people forget to take that important step of matching the portion size to the label.  Melanie Douglass, registered dietitian and NextFit trainer, is back this week with some quick tips to keep your portion sizes under control.

Push ups.  It's one of those exercises that everyone knows how to do, but this week, Ron Mathews shows you how to do them right.

Bryan Haycock M.S., an exercise physiologist with NextFit, has studied the effects of exercise, diet, and supplementation on the human body for decades, and he is here to share his considerable knowledge on the subject of diets in this special 8 part video series.  It will focus on what makes the body store fat, how diets release fat, common misconceptions about dieting, and tips for success with whatever type of diet you may choose. 

The first key to success on any diet is understanding the effects your choices make so you can make the right ones, and Bryan will explain everything you need to know in terms that anyone can understand. 

Part 1 is a quick breakdown about how your body responds to and processes fats, proteins, and carbs.

In this installment, Bryan explains what people really want to know - what makes your body released stored fat.

In this third installment, Bryan starts getting into the positives and negatives of specific kinds of diets and gives advice on how to maximize the benefits of a chosen diet plan.  This segment will focus specifically on low fat diets.

Today's episode of the Truth About Diets focuses on the Zone Diet and also touches a little bit on the subject of good versus bad fats.

In part 5, Bryan gets into one of the more controversial diet plans - the low carb diet.  For whatever reason, this diet seems to generate strong feelings from advocates and opponents alike, but Bryan really breaks down the benefits and pitfalls of this diet and provides some great insights on how to make this diet plan work for you.

Since Tim is bringing us the Featured Exercise this week, I thought I would post one of his older ones that we posted on the site before we started archiving them in the blog.

This week's Featured Exercise is from Tim Misewicz.  It's a great spine stabilization exercise that is perfect for rehabing injuries or just improving your functional mobility.

This week's featured exercise is another great toning move from Yumi Lee that also has terrific cardio benefits.