Is that exercise bike in your bedroom gathering dust? You can still turn the room into a fitness haven – but forget the bike and head straight to bed: Having vigorous sex can burn off about 130 calories per half hour!! You can burn off two kilograms a year with 135 lovemaking sessions – that works out to 2.6 times a week.

And there are other health benefits to habitual sex: British researchers who examined 914 middle-age men over 20 years found that frequent sex might help the heart. Moreover, results from a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggest that frequent ejaculation may be related to a lower risk of prostate cancer.

So for the sake of your waist and heart – not to mention a few other body parts – consider the horizontal workout. After all, it’s a lot more fun than heading to the gym.

Article extracted from Reader’s Digest December 2007 issue.