Trainers are often asked to share their opinion on the best exercise to give to clients but a fitness professional having a favorite exercise is akin to a physician having a favorite drug.

Since a universal best exercise probably doesn’t exist, trainers usually oblige and offer their personal favorite exercise. This leads every trainer to offer a different exercise and makes it more difficult for agreement since there is personal stock involved..

Let’s theoretically take a handful of people and give them every exercise in the book. This article will argue the movement that will provide most participants the broadest range of health benefits, energy, and dollar value would be walking. Here’s why:

Cardiovascular Benefits

Walking is cardiovascular activity. That means it’s relatively low intensity, using large muscle groups in a continuous, rhythmic pattern. This type of activity has not been getting too much attention in today’s culture of lifting heavy and high-intensity interval training (HIIT), yet it still has great utility. Two excellent cardiovascular benefits include:

Decreased resting/exercising blood pressure- Think of cardio as clearing out your blood vessels so everything can flow smoother and as intended.

Insulin sensitivity- light to moderate cardiovascular activity has been shown to increase insulin sensitivity. Meaning it’s easier for your hormones to utilize blood sugar. This decreases the risk for gestational diabetes, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. (2)

Bone Density

When your foot makes contact with the ground, you’re experiencing impact. This quality of activity harbors benefits that cycling, elliptical, and swimming do not. Why are impact benefits useful?

Bone mineral density- Walking not only gets you outside to get your vitamin D quota, but that low-grade blunt force allows your bones to experience similar stress and repair as your muscles do when resistance training. (3)

Weight-bearing benefits- Because this is a weight-bearing activity, you get small benefits related to resistance training as well, i.e., small strength increases, stronger connective tissue, and, again, bone health.

Safety

While deadlifting is great when done correctly, walking does not require large amounts of stress on the low back and is not likely subject to ego-lifting (prioritizing weight lifted over safety/form). Plus, deadlifting does not yield most of the benefits on this list.

Balance

Walking is glorified continuous falling. (4) To move forward, your center of gravity must either move out of your base of support or change dramatically within it. When you walk, you’re practicing dynamic (moving) balance (5) which can be beneficial for fall prevention or your run-of-the-mill clumsiness.

Most people don’t think of walking as a balance activity. However, when you trip on the sidewalk, you might fall down. You didn’t lose your balance because you tripped. You were already falling forward. Tripping just prevents you from catching yourself with your foot.

Life is drastically different without the ability to walk. Whether you need to work on your balance or not, walking is one of few common exercises that offer this benefit.

Convenience

You can multitask while walking. I could deadlift, squat, and bench all day long, but I’m no closer to the coffee shop than when I started. Unless I walk there.

Social Aspects

The absolute best part about walking is that it doesn’t require money. We learned before preschool, you can do it anywhere, and it is low enough intensity that you can talk during it. Those four items are the ideal characteristics of a social activity. Social interactions are an excellent predictor of adherence to a modality, which makes sense. If you could get coffee, exercise, and build relationships at the same time, would you?

Walking may not be the best exercise to build strength, flexibility, etc. But like said in the beginning, if you took a handful of people, walking would probably be the best exercise that would give the majority of them the widest range of health benefits.

Substituting walking with an existing program that is more intense, tolerable, and offers similar benefits. But the next time someone gets you down by discounting walking as “not real exercise,” you know they don’t subscribe to reputable platforms like Daily Origin.

What’s your favorite exercise and why?

Dan is a current epidemiologist, ACSM CPT workshop instructor, author of A Big Distraction, and has held various fitness certificates dating back to 2007. Currently, he is a certified exercise physiologist (EP-C) through ACSM with the Exercise is Medicine credential. Dan’s professional emphasis is disease prevention through exercise and self-efficacy.

To promote this stance, Dan started a Youtube Channel to teach people how to do something they may have never thought they could do and answer fitness questions that are commonly asked.

A Big Distraction

EXPERTS REFERENCED

American College of Sports Medicine,, Riebe, D., Ehrman, J. K., Liguori, G., & Magal, M. (2018). ACSM's guidelines for exercise testing and prescription (Tenth edition.). Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer.

Cederberg, H., Stančáková, A., Yaluri, N., Modi, S., Kuusisto, J., & Laakso, M. (2015). Increased risk of diabetes with statin treatment is associated with impaired insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion: a 6 year follow-up study of the METSIM cohort. Diabetologia, 58(5), 1109-1117.

Morseth, B., Emaus, N., & Jørgensen, L. (2011). Physical activity and bone: The importance of the various mechanical stimuli for bone mineral density. A review. Norsk epidemiologi, 20(2).

Winter, D. A. (1995). Human balance and posture control during standing and walking. Gait & posture, 3(4), 193-214.

Roberts, B. L. (1989). Effects of walking on balance among elders. Nursing research.