Exercise Balls

Exercise balls have become so popular that most fitness centers now offer hour-long classes using them.

We have some very high quality exercise balls with great accessories to keep your workout fun, challenging and dynamic. Many of them come with videos and/or instructional material to help you maximize your results.

It may look easy, but even elite athletes are using them to make run-of-the-mill exercises more challenging.

When you use a swiss 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 exercise 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 an exercise ball:

• 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 exercise balls 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 an exercise ball can be modified to make it more or less difficult.

Exercise balls come in a variety of sizes, to accommodate people of different heights. Wherever necessary, we provide charts to help you choose the right size.

Article courtesy of Ideal Fitness, Inc. Visit them at www.shapeupshop.com.