Disclaimer: Take my advice with a grain of salt.  All that is written here is just from my own experiences and habits.

There is definitely a correlation between mental and physical health so I want to share with my 2 readers, how I try to keep physically fit as I try to avoid those costly gym memberships and those thousand dollar aerobic / weight machines.  It is healthy to physically exert yourself regularly because it clears your head and it helps you manage in the chaos of today.  I personally find solace when I’m working out listening to Dallas Willard’s, Divine Conspiracy after the demanding work day.

For starters here is a list (in order of my personal preference and importance)

Free weights, or dumbells, are number one on the list for me because when done correctly with full ranges of motion paired with the huge variety of movements, they can workout your whole upper body, from forearms, biceps, triceps, shoulders, lats, deltoids, pecs, back, and abs.  I can not emphasize enough that in whatever movements you do, you do them with the full range of motion.  I consider large inflexible muscles, limited range of motion, muscles…unhealthy.

The pull up bar is next because, like push ups, using your own weight as the resistance force to work out your muscles just makes sense.  There are a number of pull up and chin up variations that can workout all your muscles listed in above.  For some pull up bar inspiration check out this guy on youtube.

The wrist and ankle weights should probably only be used if you do not suffer from wrist and ankle problems, as the added weight will most likely only aggravate the current problems.  Along the same lines of using these ankle and wrist weights to increase the level of workout and muscle tone, would be to use a more expensive option of weight vests.  Running up hills and going through punching drills with these weights increase my twitch, reflex and speed muscles, which is probably just a lingering habit from martial arts.

The perfect push up set is at the bottom of the list because, despite my excitement about them, I don’t find a whole lot of difference using them over doing push ups with my hands on books, cinder blocks, dumbells, etc.  The perfect push up set does two things for you: 1. allows you to go down lower than you normally would, below where your hands are positioned, and 2. allows you to rotate your arm as you do your push up, exercising more muscles than you normally would in a static push up.  The rotation is nice and increases the strength of your stability muscles and gives you some extra toning for your shoulders, but its really more of a luxury in my mind.

So, those are most of the tools that I use to workout.  Aside from these tools, I encourage push ups, sit ups, crunches, lunges, jumping exercises, wind sprints, jogging, swimming and…watching tv…I mean the Olympics for inspiration.  My last and probably most useful tip for working out is to find a friend(s) to work out with (especially when running), because except for the super motivated people, working out is sort of boring unless you have some good company.