Fitness: The Quick Fix

If your excuse for avoiding exercise is that you don't have time, you may want to re-think your workout. On Friday's edition of The Early Show, fitness expert Minna Lessig demonstrated a quick fix to help tone things up in 10 minutes.

By combining two or three exercises at once, you use several muscle groups all at once, so you burn more calories. But you can't just do any two or three exercises together. It is important to select exercises that flow smoothly with one another, so there is no awkwardness from one movement to another.

And, with only 10 minutes to do a toning workout, it's efficient to do one multi-muscle exercise that targets muscle groups like triceps and legs, for example, and then follow it immediately with another movement that gets the same areas. This way you are fatiguing the muscle groups faster.

Lessig says a series of arm and leg combinations, including lunges with front raises, followed immediately with dead lifts and side lateral raises are good. These multi-muscle movements target the hamstrings and shoulders. Doing front raises first tires the strongest part of your shoulder, so that when you get to side laterals you can work the middle portion of your deltoids more because the front portion was just fatigued.

Does a quick sweat really make a difference? Yes, it does, Lessig says. Anything positive you do for your body makes a difference. But, while a quick 10-minute workout will increase your strength, it will not give you bigger muscles.

To increase muscle size, you really have to lift heavier weights and do more isolation work, she adds. Such toning workouts often are used in gym "body sculpting" classes. Women love them because they know they will not get bulky muscles from the workouts.

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