This article originally appeared on Time.com. 

There was once a time, just a few decades ago, when few people ran to stay in shape. Today, running is almost synonymous with exercise. If your goal is to be fit and healthy, you’re either a runner or someone who’s planning to start running really soon (promise).

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Running has become so popular, in part, because a mountain of evidence suggests it’s great for a long, disease-free life.

One 2014 study found that running is linked to a 45% drop in risk of death due to cardiovascular disease. “Runners on average lived three years longer compared to non-runners,” says study author D.C. Lee, an assistant professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University. Those mortality benefits held fairly steady regardless of how fast, how long or how often a person ran.

Lee and his colleagues just published a follow-up report showing even more impressive benefits. Running for about two hours each week was linked to three extra years of life. He and his coauthors also found that running outperforms walking, cycling and some other forms of aerobic exercise when it comes to lengthening life.

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Research has also linked running to lower rates of stroke, cancer and metabolic diseases like diabetes, as well as better bone strength. “Weight-bearing exercises like running promote greater bone mineral density,” says Arthur Weltman, a professor and chair of kinesiology at the University of Virginia. Especially as you age and your bones start to weaken, running can help keep the bones of your legs healthy.

Muscles also get stronger with running. “One of the tenets of training is that when you do damage to muscle tissue, it’s stronger after repair,” Weltman says. Your heart is a muscle. And while hard running can initially result in increased levels of proteins associated with heart damage, these levels quickly return to normal, and the heart bounces back stronger than before, he explains.

But in order for that strengthening to occur, you have to give your muscles time to recover. “Depending on your fitness and how hard you go, running can be vigorous, high-intensity exercise,” Weltman says. “If you’re running hard and pushing yourself every day, you have the potential to over-train and do some damage.”

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Overtraining is most likely to cause joint-related issues: lower-body aches or strains that may sideline a runner for a few days or weeks. If you always seem to be injured, that’s a good indication you’re not giving yourself enough rest, Weltman says. Running is high-impact exercise, so it may cause pain or injury in people with obesity or those with joint problems—particularly if they don’t allow enough time for recovery between bouts.

But overtraining may lead to more than simple pain or sprains, some recent scientific literature suggests. Research from James O’Keefe, a cardiologist with the University of Missouri-Kansas City, found that doing excessive endurance exercise—especially during middle-age and beyond—could theoretically lead to unhealthy structural changes in the chambers of the heart. His research pegged “too much” somewhere beyond an hour per day of vigorous exercise. More isn’t always better when it comes to running and endurance training.

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It’s also important to realize that what’s “vigorous” for one runner is not going to be vigorous for another. “There’s a lot of person-to-person variation that depends on fitness level,” Weltman explains. For older people or those who haven’t broken a sweat in a while, brisk walking might constitute a tough workout.

“I think the best way to exercise and avoid risk of injury revolves around perception of effort, rather than time or duration,” he says. “At least twice a week, you want to exercise at an intensity that you perceive as hard.” At most, you want to alternate between hard and easy days “so your body has 48 hours to recover.”

But what if you’re concerned about running too little, not too much? Even a little running has been shown to pay huge dividends. In Lee’s study, people who ran as little as 30 to 59 minutes a week—just five to 10 minutes a day—lowered their risk of cardiovascular death by 58% compared to non-runners. Even in small doses, running rocks.

This article originally appeared on DailyBurn.com.

Walk into any HIIT class or CrossFit box and chances are you’ll be asked to do a variation of a plyometric jump. Box jumps, frog leaps and tuck jumps help you improve your VO2 max (speed), flexibility and range of motion. But that’s not all. Their explosive power works your entire body, while getting your heart rate up.

Kat Ellis, head trainer and instructor at Uplift Studios in New York City, says, “Plyometrics are a mix of stability and strength, and create a strong foundation for doing explosive weightlifting moves like the clean and jerk and snatch.”

But if you’re not nailing down the form of these moves properly, you can risk injuring yourself and cause strain on your joints. That’s where tempo training comes in. Modulating movement based around a tempo allows the body to activate fast twitch muscle fibers and to learn to distinguish the difference between speed and power, Ellis explains. “The body finds a moment of explosive activation. For example if you’re doing a push-up, concentrate on lowering the chest down for three seconds and pushing back up to a plank in one. The tempo, is 3-2-1, push.”

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Plyometrics help develop core strength and joint stability, too. “Tempo training forces you to slow things down. You’re regressing the exercise to make sure your whole body is truly engaged,” Ellis explains.

According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine, plyometrics are broken down into three phases: the eccentric phase, the amortization phase and the concentric phase. Take the box jump, for instance. The eccentric phase is when you’re in a half-squat position with your knees bent. When you drive from your heels to jump, that’s the amortization phase. The concentric phase is when you finally land on the box and release the energy and tension in your muscles. With that said, take Ellis’s lead, as she breaks down these three popular jumps.

RELATED: 3 Plyometric Moves That Turn up the Burn

Bust a Move: 3 Plyometrics Exercises, Broken Down

1. Frog Leaps

Progression 1
How to: Stand with your feet a little wider than hip-distance apart with your toes slightly turned out to the sides. Raise your arms at your sides with your hands overhead and palms facing forward (a). Sit into a deep sumo squat with your butt back and down so your weight is evenly distributed from your arches to your heels (b). Press up from the squat and lift your right leg up to hip height, bending your right knee (c). At the same time, engage your right oblique muscles so you bring your right thigh towards your right elbow (d). Return to the starting position and repeat on the left side. Alternate for five reps on each side.

Progression 2
How to: Sit back into a deep sump squat position with your hands overhead together and palms facing forward (a). Driving from your heels, jump up, bending your knees so your thighs touch or brush up against your thighs (b). Land softly into a sumo squat before jumping again (c). Do five to eight reps.

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2. Tuck Jumps

Progression 1
How to: Stand with your feet hip-distance apart with your toes facing forward (a). Sit into a squat with your arms at your sides raised to shoulder height, palms facing each other (b). As you stand up from the squat, lift your right leg to hip height with your right knee bent (c). At the same time, place one palm on top of the other to meet your right knee. Repeat on the left side (d). Alternate for five reps on each side.

Progression 2
How to: Start in a squat position with your arms at shoulder height and palms facing each other (a). Jump up as high as you can, driving your knees towards your chest, almost touching the palms of your hands (b). Re-extend your legs to land softly on the ground (c). Do five to eight reps.

RELATED: 5 Plyo Box Exercises to Rev Your Fitness

3. Box Jumps

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Progression 1
How to: Stand behind a box or step with your feet shoulder-width apart and a slight bend in your knees (a). Step one foot at a time onto the box, keeping the slight bend in your knees, and then step back down one foot at a time (b). Do five reps.

Progression 2
How to: Stand behind a box with your feet shoulder-width apart and a slight bend in your knees (a). Jump onto the box with both feet, landing with your knees slightly bent (b). Jump back down and repeat for five to eight reps. Note: If you’re doing this move in a CrossFit WOD, standard technique is to straighten your legs at the top of the box, standing tall, before hopping or stepping back down.

GIFs: Tiffany Ayuda / Life by Daily Burn

This article originally appeared on Time.com. 

To get better balance, power and agility, kickboxing is king among workouts. Experts who have studied the sport say nearly everyone—even older people who might shy away from such things—can benefit from throwing a punch.

Unlike most other types of exercise, kickboxing emphasizes powerful movements. Power is different from strength, and for older adults, it’s an even better predictor of mobility and their risk for falls, says Kurt Jackson, an associate professor of neurology and rehab science at the University of Dayton in Ohio. “Pure strength is what a weightlifter uses, but producing power is about both force and speed,” he says.

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Kickboxing training tends to involve shorts bouts, two to three minutes long, of intense, repetitive movement—like hitting a punching bag over and over again and kicking and kneeing a pad someone else is holding. “If you look at the research on high-intensity interval training [HIIT], you see these short, intense periods of activity can have big benefits,” he says. Some research shows that even very brief stretches—just 60 seconds—of HIIT can offer the same gains in heart and lung health as 45 minutes of less-intense exercise.

Kickboxing has been shown to improve fitness, power, flexibility and agility, according to a study of healthy men in their twenties who trained three days a week for five weeks. The men in the study improved their upper and lower body power by about 7%, while shaving off more than a second from their time in a 50-meter dash.

It also torches a lot of calories. One study from the American Council on Exercise (ACE) found that the kind of punching-and-kicking combinations used in Tae Bo or “cardio kickboxing” classes burn more than eight calories per minute—about the same amount you’d burn while swimming.

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The sport can also improve coordination, even in the most extreme cases. Jackson studies the neuromuscular benefits of kickboxing training for people with multiple sclerosis (MS), a condition in which poor communication between the brain and muscles can lead to falls or problems with activities that rely on multitasking, like walking and talking. Kickboxing helps strengthen neuromuscular control in people with the disease in ways that improve balance, mobility and dual-tasking activities, he found.

The benefits likely apply to older adults as well. Kickboxing improves both types of balance that the body requires—anticipatory and reactive—and better balance reduces risk of falls or muscle weakness. “Anticipatory balance is something you use when you can see a need coming, like when you’re stabilizing yourself to reach up into a cupboard,” Jackson says. Reactive balance is the type of mind-muscle coordination you need to catch your balance when you trip, or when life throws some unexpected object your way.

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Those skills are useful before you hit old age. If your workout routine relies on lifting weights, running or yoga, your neuromuscular system may not be tuned to handle the kind of dynamic motion required for sports—even the ones you do just a few times a year, like skiing or pickup basketball. “You see these people step or twist wrong and suffer major tears,” Jackson says. “Kickboxing training is a great way to avoid those types of injuries.”

However, the swift whole-body movements required in kickboxing could also cause injuries. Back, knee, hip and shoulder strains are all common among kickboxers, found a study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

As with most other forms of vigorous exercise, if you’re a newbie, it’s important to ease into kickboxing gradually. “If you have a bad knee or some other limitation, it’s important to have a coach or physical therapist who knows how to adapt a kickboxing program to your needs, and who will introduce it in a controlled, systematic manner,” Jackson says. Start slow, and you’ll get the most benefits in the end.