By Lisa Snow
Personal Trainer, New York City

With so many people setting New Years resolutions about fitness, every sports store will try to convince you that you need to own a treadmill, a bowflex, or another expensive piece of gym equipment to get in shape.  But many of the most effective pieces of fitness equipment cost under $25 and are small enough to work in an NYC apartment — tubing, mini-bands, jump ropes, neoprene dumbbells, etc.  Now you can add one more outstanding tool to the list.  Gliding Discs allow you to transform old-school exercises like squats, lunges, side lunges, planks, and pushups, into beautiful, graceful, fluid movements.  In a traditional lunge, you have to pick up one foot, step forward, drop into the lunge, then step back to where you started.  In a Gliding lunge, you can simply slide your front foot forward, then slide back to the starting point – your foot never leaves the floor.  Gliding Discs look like paper plates, but they’re made of hard plastic and fabric and are much more durable.  How can something so simplistic be so useful?