Fall, like spring, marks an ideal season for taking up a new exercise program. It’s not too hot, not too cold, and autumn’s natural beauty adds a little extra incentive for moving it outside.

If your employees have been slacking off because of the heat (or for any other reason, for that matter), mark the kickoff of fall as the beginning of a new and improved exercise campaign.

Encourage them to get back into the swing of things with a walking program designed to get them back in shape and recommitted to fitness. Besides the physical benefits of a walking workout, they’ll get all the mind- and soul-soothing effects of nature at its most dazzling.

With a little luck and a lot of encouragement, by the time winter rolls around, exercise will have become an indispensable part of their daily routine. And they’re sure to be better off than they were before.

So start a walking group, or up the stakes with a little healthy competition. Pass out pedometers so staff members can track their steps, and offer a cash incentive to the winning walker.

The ease and familiarity of walking lends itself to beginners, but its appeal is universal. And so are the benefits.

Here are some of the main reasons to start walking, from MedicineNet.com:

Colds, flu, and seasonal allergies will probably start making the rounds at your office in the near future, if they haven’t already. For your employees, that means feeling physically ill and mentally drained; for you, it means taking up the slack for your workers’ missed workdays and a general decrease in productivity.

Too early to worry about the flu, you say? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the timing of flu is very unpredictable and can vary from season to season. Flu activity most commonly peaks in the U.S. in January or February. However, seasonal flu activity can begin as early as October and continue to occur as late as May.”

And it never hurts to be prepared. Go ahead and start promoting the flu vaccine. Last year nearly 131 million people got vaccinated, a record high in this country, according to the CDC, which recommends a vaccine for everyone over 6 months of age.

Fortunately for corporate wellness folks, the push for vaccination is resulting in easier and more convenient options that you can use in your no-excuses promotion efforts. These include nasal sprays, smaller needles, and more locations, such as many pharmacies, where flu shots can be administered.

Until they find a cure for the common cold, your best bet is prevention. Encourage your workers to employ a healthy dose of common sense to keep themselves well and to keep germs from spreading. This includes frequent hand-washing, covering coughs and sneezes, and sanitizing desktops and common areas. You may want to provide a stockpile of disinfecting wipes to make the latter more convenient.

As for allergies, advise your employees on ways to avoid their triggers, which may be anything from dust mites to mold spores to pollen. Have your office air ducts cleaned before the weather becomes cold enough to turn on the heat. Over-the-counter allergy medications can help alleviate your workers’ symptoms, and if they’re severe, point them in the direction of an allergy specialist.

Here’s to a happy, healthy fall.

That’s advice any corporate wellness advisor can get behind. After all, heart health is a key factor in overall health, and a strongly pumping heart keeps your employees in prime physical and mental condition.

With heart disease ranked as the number one killer of men and women in America, promoting heart health should be at the top of your priority list when it comes to educating your staff on how to preserve good health or improve bad health.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “About every 25 seconds, an American will have a coronary event, and about one every minute will die from one.”

Heart health factors in everything from reducing stroke and heart attack risk to lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Conveniently, the best defense against heart problems is something that also tackles obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other health issues that negatively impact your workers: diet and exercise.

The tools of the corporate wellness trade, healthy diet and daily exercise are your best go-to pieces of advice when raising awareness about heart health.

Keeping this vital muscle in tip-top shape may be easier than you think, too: A study published recently in Circulation: Heart Failure cites four simple steps to a healthy heart.

And we do mean simple: Don’t smoke, lose weight, exercise regularly, and eat vegetables.

In the study, people who adopted these lifestyle habits reduced their risk of heart failure by 81% in women in 69% in men, according to WebMD.

More specifically, the CDC recommends the following:

Odds are, that’s because their perspective of “eating light” is skewed. They imagine bland rice cakes, undressed salads, incessant hunger pangs … in a word, deprivation.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and the odds of successfully adopting and maintaining a balanced and nutritious diet of lighter fare are much better if the feeling of deprivation can be avoided altogether.

Food should be enjoyed, not just used as fuel for the body, and enjoyable doesn’t necessarily mean calorie-laden.

Enter diet tricks that can make you forget you’re dieting.

We’ve all heard advice about snacking on fresh fruit when you get a hankering for something sweet, or munching raw veggies to get your crunch fix. And while those are both sound ideas, there are other ways to indulge those cravings without feeling slighted.

Sometimes it’s just about portion control. If only chocolate will do (and granted, there’s just not a suitable substitution for some things), satisfy the need on a small scale. Instead of a jumbo candy bar, try a square of high-quality chocolate … the dark kind, for an extra boost of antioxidant power.

Can’t pass up the mashed potatoes and gravy? Don’t … just eat a little, slowly, and refrain from going back for seconds.

And lightening up on portions isn’t the only way to cut calories without giving up the good stuff completely.

Tempt your employees with these samples from WebMD’s 100-calorie-snack roundup:

Between the baking heat of the dog days or, conversely, the soaking rain from tropical storms, outdoor exercise is unappealing at best, impossible at worst.

Along with winter, late summer poses arguably the biggest threat to an exercise routine.

Sweating it out is one thing, but when your daily walk becomes an exercise in fire resistance, or when torrential rains make drowning on land a distinct possibility, it’s probably time to roll out Plan B.

Whether that’s an exercise class at the gym, a few laps around the mall, or a living-room-based workout doesn’t really matter; the point is to keep up the momentum of physical activity.

Skipping workouts quickly snowballs and can eventually lead to quitting the attempt altogether. So, when weather threatens to undo your progress, it’s important to crank up YOUR efforts to promote exercise among your employees.

Getting them over the hump … be it summer heat, tropical rains, or general burnout … isn’t nearly as hard as getting them to start exercising in the first place. But it’s just as important.

Indoor workouts can be whatever you make of them. Help your employees discover the range of options available when weather or temperatures (hot or cold) keep them from taking on exercise in the great outdoors.

A few options:

Surely your employees are. And if their full plates are what’s holding them back from filling those plates with nutrition, you can help them with a solution.

With a little planning at the outset, it’s possible to stockpile healthy snacks and the makings of well-balanced meals for an entire week. The key is making it convenient to eat well (and inconvenient to fill up on junk).

If the office break room is a sanctuary for tasty treats like leftover birthday cakes, doughnuts, and cookies brought in by well-meaning employees, the temptation to indulge is hard to resist.

If, however, the fridge holds a platter of rainbow-colored fruits and veggies, neatly cut up and ready for the taking, your workers are far more likely to partake of these than to root through their desk drawers for vending machine change.

Encourage your staff members to make grocery lists that will facilitate their efforts to eat healthy. Having a list at the supermarket decreases the odds that they’ll raid the snack aisle and load up on buy-one-get-one deals on potato chips.

According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s shopping tip sheet, it’s a good idea to stock up on lower-calorie basics such as:

Remember that diet isn’t just about weight loss but about improving health, too, lowering the risks of heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes.

Benefits to the waistline are just a nice bonus.

New research published in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association, shows that quality of sleep can have an effect on blood pressure. The study found that men who experienced low-quality sleep, in this case defined by less of the deep-sleep stage known as slow-wave sleep, were 80% more likely to develop hypertension.

Slow-wave sleep has also been linked to memory and physiological functions including metabolism and diabetes, along with other factors affecting blood pressure, reports ScienceDaily.

Says study co-author Susan Redline, M.D., “People should recognize that sleep, diet, and physical activity are critical to health, including heart health and optimal blood pressure control. Poor sleep may be a powerful predictor for adverse health outcomes. Initiatives to improve sleep may provide novel approaches for reducing hypertension burden.”

You’re probably already promoting good sleep habits among your employees because of their positive effect on productivity, job satisfaction, and the overall well being of your staff members.

But, as this research indicates, the physical repercussions of poor sleep can be far more serious than workers yawning their way through a staff meeting.

Help your employees rest easy and potentially improve their health with these tips from the National Sleep Foundation:

There aren’t any major benefits to be gained from phoning it in during your workouts, but it is possible to get your daily exercise and incorporate healthy habits without putting undue stress on yourself.

And that means different things to different people. Lucky for you, there are countless exercise options out there, all of them customizable for people with different needs and wants: home workouts for the gym-averse, low-impact workouts for those with knee problems, shortcuts for people with limited time …

The key is finding something sustainable, which, for new exercisers requires some exploration. They may need guidance in the beginning, before they have a handle on their abilities, endurance level, and exercise “personality.”

Failing to find the perfect fit at first can be discouraging, especially for someone who is trying exercise on for size for the first time and is having trouble committing.

The same goes for other aspects of a healthy lifestyle, such as good nutrition, good sleep, and good stress coping skills.

You can help steer your employees in the right direction (and prevent them from giving up their efforts out of frustration or indecisiveness) with some tips that will make good health easier on them.

Tips and tricks for squeezing a little so-called “stealth health” into a workday can help them hang on while they experiment with different techniques to find their perfect plan.

WebMD offers these pointers to improve health and fitness the easy way:

Sure, it’s nice (and necessary) to have a break from the daily grind. It gives people time to catch up on life outside the office, to engage in family time and leisure activities, as well as take care of those obligations and errands that somehow don’t get done during a busy workweek.

The problem comes when people throw health and wellness efforts out the window come Friday and then try to pick them back up on Monday.

Loosening up a little bit on your off-days won’t derail all of the progress you’ve made. But without maintaining at least some measure of your day-to-day routine, you’ll only succeed in making things harder on yourself.

One or two missed workouts won’t necessarily cause anyone to give up their exercise efforts altogether, but from a psychological standpoint, it could open the door to skipping workouts more frequently.

The same goes for other health habits, such as eating right. Planning a restaurant meal or two? Just make sure to make smart choices, including choosing lighter options, splitting entrees with a dining partner, or passing on the complimentary pre-meal basket of bread.

As for weekend sleep habits, try to maintain your normal bedtime and wake-up hours. Not only does sleep keep the body primed and ready to enjoy the weekend fun, getting enough of it will make Monday morning easier to face.

Health News This Week:

Aside from the commonly cited complaints about carpal tunnel symptoms, cramped workspaces, and tension headaches, there’s one thing that arguably surpasses them all in its ability to derail your workers: back pain.

Some 80% of Americans will experience back pain at some point in their lives, so odds are it has already affected someone on your staff.

It’s extremely common, chronic, and impossible to ignore, which is why back pain can be such a pain for employers as well as those suffering the physical effects.

Whether the problem stems from heavy lifting (the wrong way), bad posture, or simply an improperly adjusted chair, the results are the same: nagging pain that can hit your business with medical costs, absenteeism, and decreased productivity.

Not only that, but it undermines your hard-earned progress in getting your workers to engage in more physical activity. When simply getting up to walk to the bathroom is a painful ordeal, exercise of any kind is the last thing on their minds.

But maybe it should be. Exercise may be good medicine for back pain, strengthening your back, stomach, and leg muscles and helping support the spine, according to WebMD. Some exercises can be modified or substituted to account for back pain.

It depends, however, on the cause and severity of the pain and the exercise you’re doing. (That’s why consulting a doctor should be the first step.)

Help your employees avoid back pain and ease any pain they’re already experiencing by passing on some valuable tips for a healthy back.

Start with these pieces of advice from WebMD for preserving back health: