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If you could do just one exercise, what would it be?
This question drives fitness experts crazy. Why? Because no one has to choose just ONE exercise. So it’s a meaningless query in the real world.
Still, a New York Times Magazine writer posed the question to a few leading exercise scientists in a recent story called (surprise!), What’s the Single Best Exercise?
Responses varied from the butterfly (in swimming) to brisk walking to the burpee to the squat. Interestingly, exercises like the squat and burpee were ultimately thrown out of the running. The rationale? That no one would do a routine that consisted only of one or the other.
To which we respond: Of course they wouldn’t! Which is why it’s a stupid question in the first place.
Now we’ll acknowledge that we’ve polled trainers on what they think the most beneficial exercise is—after all, it’s interesting. But we wouldn’t suggest you build your entire workout around that exercise. (It was the snatch-grip deadlift, by the way.) Fitness is like your investments; you need to diversity.
Ultimately, the article makes a strong case for high-intensity interval training as the single-best exercise you can do. This is when you do a hard sprint, rest, and repeat a prescribed number of times. It’s intense and effective—for fat loss and cardiovascular fitness. So we agree that it’s a top choice.
But as Martin Gibala, Ph.D., chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University—and one of the experts quoted in the story—points out: The downside of interval sprints is that they don’t build strength as effectively as the squat. So Gibala ups the ante and recommends sprinting up stairs. This mode of exercise counts as a power workout and an interval session all at once. Again, not a bad choice, we say.
However, this still provides a fairly one dimensional workout that doesn’t effectively work your upper body. Enter our own Rachel Cosgrove, C.S.C.S., co-owner of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, California, and a longtime Men’s Health advisor. She’s had tremendous success designing fat loss workouts that, in her words, “combine the principles of high-intensity interval training, and the benefits of strength training into one workout.”
Cosgrove’s workouts rely on metabolic circuits—moving from one exercise to the next without rest. These are fast-paced weight-training routines in which you alternate between upper- and lower-body exercises like mountain climbers, goblet squats, dumbbell row, or split jumps. You might compare this type of activity to running repeated bouts of 30- to 60-second sprints. While sprinting has been shown to burn calories at a high rate, it can’t be sustained for long because the muscles in your lower body become fatigued—and that’s even if you’re resting between sprints. “But with metabolic circuits, you’re emphasizing different muscles in each exercise,” says Cosgrove. “So you can maintain a high-intensity effort for a much longer duration, and with almost no rest.”
The result: The muscle-working, calorie-burning benefits of intense resistance training and sprints, combined with the nonstop movement of long, steady-state aerobic exercise. All hail the king. You’ll have to accept our apologies that it’s not just a single exercise.
This question drives fitness experts crazy. Why? Because no one has to choose just ONE exercise. So it’s a meaningless query in the real world.
Still, a New York Times Magazine writer posed the question to a few leading exercise scientists in a recent story called (surprise!), What’s the Single Best Exercise?
Responses varied from the butterfly (in swimming) to brisk walking to the burpee to the squat. Interestingly, exercises like the squat and burpee were ultimately thrown out of the running. The rationale? That no one would do a routine that consisted only of one or the other.
To which we respond: Of course they wouldn’t! Which is why it’s a stupid question in the first place.
Now we’ll acknowledge that we’ve polled trainers on what they think the most beneficial exercise is—after all, it’s interesting. But we wouldn’t suggest you build your entire workout around that exercise. (It was the snatch-grip deadlift, by the way.) Fitness is like your investments; you need to diversity.
Ultimately, the article makes a strong case for high-intensity interval training as the single-best exercise you can do. This is when you do a hard sprint, rest, and repeat a prescribed number of times. It’s intense and effective—for fat loss and cardiovascular fitness. So we agree that it’s a top choice.
But as Martin Gibala, Ph.D., chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University—and one of the experts quoted in the story—points out: The downside of interval sprints is that they don’t build strength as effectively as the squat. So Gibala ups the ante and recommends sprinting up stairs. This mode of exercise counts as a power workout and an interval session all at once. Again, not a bad choice, we say.
However, this still provides a fairly one dimensional workout that doesn’t effectively work your upper body. Enter our own Rachel Cosgrove, C.S.C.S., co-owner of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, California, and a longtime Men’s Health advisor. She’s had tremendous success designing fat loss workouts that, in her words, “combine the principles of high-intensity interval training, and the benefits of strength training into one workout.”
Cosgrove’s workouts rely on metabolic circuits—moving from one exercise to the next without rest. These are fast-paced weight-training routines in which you alternate between upper- and lower-body exercises like mountain climbers, goblet squats, dumbbell row, or split jumps. You might compare this type of activity to running repeated bouts of 30- to 60-second sprints. While sprinting has been shown to burn calories at a high rate, it can’t be sustained for long because the muscles in your lower body become fatigued—and that’s even if you’re resting between sprints. “But with metabolic circuits, you’re emphasizing different muscles in each exercise,” says Cosgrove. “So you can maintain a high-intensity effort for a much longer duration, and with almost no rest.”
The result: The muscle-working, calorie-burning benefits of intense resistance training and sprints, combined with the nonstop movement of long, steady-state aerobic exercise. All hail the king. You’ll have to accept our apologies that it’s not just a single exercise.
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