There are as many ways to maintain fitness as there are people seeking that sometimes-elusive goal, but there are a far smaller number of basic components which comprise it.

1. Flexibility. This includes skeletal alignment and posture.
   
2. Endurance. This quality includes aerobic capacity, cardiovascular endurance, localized muscular endurance, "lactate threshold", and a variety of other aspects, all of which influence both health and performance.
   
3. Strength. This would include muscle tone, contractile strength, etc. Strength exercises often combat osteoporosis and degenerative joint diseases. Strength certainly affects posture, another primary aspect of health.
   
4. Coordination. Your level of coordination influences all of the other arenas, as well as overall enjoyment of life. Do you move fluidly and smoothly, like a healthy animal? Or just sort of plod along? Trip over your own feet? Or glide like a dancer? Although some people have more of these qualities than others do, everyone can improve.

Swimming is on EVERYONE'S "top-five" list of exercises. Endurance, coordination, strength, and flexibility.

Running is superb for fitness, imparting very high levels of of aerobic fitness.  Another excellent aerobic discipline is a type of weight training called PERIPHERAL HEART ACTION (PHA). PHA is a form of circuit training.

Do I need to define terms? All right. Traditional weight training uses say five exercises as basics: Bench Press, Squat, Dead Lift, Biceps Curl, and Shoulder Press. You would perform 8-12 Bench presses, wait a minute or two, do another 8-12, wait another minute, then do a final 8-12. If you can perform that last set, it is time to increase your weights. Then you go to the next exercise and do the same thing. And so on. You would perform this series (or one similar) 2-4 times a week. This is, in its most basic form, weight training. (Read Joyce Vendrell's NOW OR NEVER, or the GOLD'S GYM BOOK OF WEIGHT TRAINING, or one of the other thousands of good books on the subject for more information.

Now. Weight training is called Anaerobic exercise, meaning "without oxygen", which means you are specifically trying to generate an oxygen debt in your muscles, seeing how much power you can exert with the juice your muscles have in storage. This is one important type of fitness. Another is AEROBIC, which means "With oxygen". Sprinting is anaerobic. Jogging is aerobic. In general, aerobic exercise is exercise where you are too fatigued to sing, but you can still talk. Really!

So - how to do this with weight training? The simplest way is to decrease the rest periods between exercises. But this doesn't give the muscles sufficient chance to recover, so you never develop your strength potential, nor get much in the way of muscle growth. So you do "Circuit Training."

In circuit training, instead of doing three sets of Bench presses, then three sets of squats, then three sets of dead lifts (and if you aren't familiar with these terms, once again, get a good book on the subject) you would do one set of 8-12 Bench Presses, then a set of 8-12 Squats, and then your dead lifts, and so on. In other words, one set of muscles is working while another rests. But the heart is kept pumping the whole time. You can achieve a very high level of stress like this, causing a nice adaptive response.

A further refinement is the Peripheral Heart Action System. Basically, you group your exercises so that the exertion is spread over your body. Upper, Middle, Lower, right after each other. For instance: Bench Press, Deadlift, Squat. Or Shoulder Press, crunch, calf raise. Or Biceps curl, leg raise, leg curls. See? You are specifically training your circulatory system to shunt blood efficiently from one location to another. You are working your localized muscular endurance, and "Lactate Threshold". By doing this, you not only develop cardiovascular endurance, but the specific muscular endurance one needs to excel in sports.

The one disadvantage is that, again, general system fatigue prevents you from using heavy weights. One way around this is to use fewer reps. And this is where I began to wonder if there wasn't an ideal configuration for such an exercise system. I developed something I called a "Cube" - with the proportions 6X6X6.

That is: Six exercises, six sets, six reps each, arranged in PHA configuration. The effects were phenomenal. I further refined it using Pete Sisko's "Power Factor" training approach, which measures pounds per minute instead of weight and reps. Simple and elegant, I promise you. His book should be sought out and read by anyone serious about weight training.

So, by grouping exercises in this configuration, the following fitness factors can be produced in a single work out:

1. Strength
2. Balance
3. Coordination (if using free weights)
4. Cardiovascular endurance
5. Muscular endurance

The following are samples of each approach.

Bench Press, Dead Lift, Squat, Biceps Curl, Crunch, Calf Raise. Determine the proper weights: if you can do six sets of six reps with a weight, it is time to increase it in that exercise. If you can't finish six reps the first time, it is too heavy. Progress from one exercise to the next until you have completed a set of six. Then rest a minute, and start over. As with all aerobic exercises, it is best to use a pulse rate monitor with this, and keep track of exertion.