The key to maxing out the return on investment (ROI) from your gym session lies in stripping out anything superfluous. You should focus on five exercises, sometimes known as the 'Big 5'. Nothing else.

Ah, the "dadbod". A recently-coined term, it describes the body of a man whose belly suggests that he's had a few thousand beers during grand final season. Now, he's not "fat" by any means. In fact, his broad shoulders suggests that he balances his pizza intake with bench presses and curls. So how does this body occur and how do you undo a "dadbod?"

Being healthy is simple, right? "Eat less, move more." That's easy to say, but practicality is one of the most important things when it comes to health and fitness. Recommendations like this are blanket statements that don't address practicality -- so when it comes down to it, which is more important? Diet, or exercise?

If you've ever read a fitness blog, forum, or even Instagram, you've probably heard the term macros thrown around. Short for "macronutrients", it refers to carbs, fats and proteins - the three basic components of every diet. If you get their proportions right, it makes dieting a lot more effective when simple calorie restriction fails.

It might seem like there are perks to exercising on an empty stomach, like burning more fat per workout, but the downsides greatly outweigh the benefits. Here's why you're probably better off fuelling up before you go for a run or crank out some super sets at the gym.

Mary Cain is not the first or the last person to be told she has to be thinner to be a better athlete, but her powerful story about quitting Nike’s running team shows just how harmful this idea can be. She says she was the “fastest girl in America” before she switched coaches and found herself told over and over to get “thinner, and thinner, and thinner.” Her performance deteriorated, as did her mental health under the pressure.

Some people exercise solely to improve and maintain an already-fabulous physique. Others just want to make their bodies look presentable by shedding visceral fat.

If you're looking to get your BMI down as quickly and efficiently as possible, this explainer from an exercise physiologist will help to steer you in the right direction.

The Whole30 diet declares swaths of food off-limits, and sets up ironclad rules about the little that's left. That means it checks a lot of boxes for a fad diet or one that's too draconian to be effective. But there's good here too, enough that it might help if you know what you're in for.

There were a lot of trendy diets in 2019, including a few even I hadn’t heard of before I started researching this list. Google published the ten most-googled diets, and we’re here to explain what they are and what you might want to know if you’re looking into them.

A thrusting young buck at work recently approached me to ask for some tips on toning up. He does a lot of exercise but lives pretty generously. That means, whatever his body asks him for, he generously provides. As a result he has cultivated something of a "Dadbod" and has now decided to take action to stem the tide.

We've all seen those transformation photos of people going from pufferfish-like bellies to enviously defined abs. You may have mused, "I wish I could get to that 'After' picture, too." Oh, but you can. Without actually being close to that great a shape, in fact. It's not honest, but marketers do it, and hot damn, you will look fabulous.

Every year, for many, many years, I would promise myself I'd lose weight. Sometimes I would make a little headway, but mostly I didn't. Then in 2017, it happened. Like most huge changes, it was actually lots of little choices adding up to something big. Here's how I did it.

Bodies change a great deal over time, and sometimes those transformations are dramatic. When you see a friend who suddenly looks different, there’s a strong impulse to remark on it. Sometimes that kind of comment will be extremely welcome — even expected — and sometimes it will be unappreciated and downright hurtful.

Core exercises will build up your abs, but they do nothing for the layer of fat on top of them. Likewise, no leg exercise can give you slimmer thighs. And yet headlines and tweets about shrinking specific body parts abound -- even when the articles themselves contradict the headline.

iOS and Android: Intermittent fasting isn’t magic, but it works well as a weight loss tool for people who manage to stick to it. If that’s you, consider using one of these fasting trackers to remind you of start and end times and to keep tabs on how well you’ve stuck to your plan in the past.

We’ve all stepped on an old, analogue scale and insisted the number was wrong - it must be the scale! But is buying an expensive, new digital scale with all its extra features any more accurate?

Feeling so cold you shiver is an awful, horrible experience, but there's a hidden perk. Shivering can actually burn some calories through the magic of biochemistry.

You can punch your stats into online calculators, tweak your Fitbit settings, and meticulously track every calorie you burn, but no amount of maths can tell you how many calories your body really burns in a day. To get a real answer, you need to do a little self-experimentation.

Clearly, some amount of fitness is genetic: You can’t expect everybody who follows the same workout to have identical results. It’s tempting to get tested to see whether you personally have the same genes as elite sprinters or weightlifters.

But DNA tests can’t tell you much about your fitness, and it turns out that knowing your results may actually change how you feel and perform.