The best exercises are the ones that build your cardiovascular fitness, maintain your muscle mass, and keep your joints moving through their full range of motion. No single exercise checks every box, but a combination of strength training, aerobic work, and movements that challenge your balance and stability covers the most ground for health and longevity. The specifics matter less than you might think. What matters is hitting the right types of movement at the right intensity.
Why Cardio Fitness Matters More Than You Think
Cardiovascular fitness, measured by how efficiently your body uses oxygen during exertion, is one of the strongest predictors of how long you’ll live. A 2018 study of over 120,000 people published in JAMA Network Open found that people with the lowest cardio fitness had a five-fold higher risk of death from all causes compared to elite performers. That risk gap was larger than the risk associated with smoking, diabetes, or coronary artery disease. Even moving from “below average” to “above average” fitness cut mortality risk by about 29%.
The takeaway is simple: any exercise that makes your heart and lungs work harder is worth doing. Walking, cycling, swimming, rowing, jogging, and dancing all count. The baseline recommendation is 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity activity (where you can talk but not sing) or 75 minutes of vigorous activity (where holding a conversation gets difficult). Doubling those numbers to 300 or 150 minutes, respectively, provides additional benefits and can reduce cardiovascular disease mortality by 22% to 31%.
High-Intensity Intervals vs. Steady Cardio
If you’re short on time, high-intensity interval training delivers more fitness improvement per minute than steady-state cardio. A systematic review comparing the two approaches found that intervals were significantly better at improving peak oxygen uptake, the gold standard measure of cardio fitness. This held true across study durations, from 7 weeks to over 12 weeks. Intervals also produced greater improvements in insulin sensitivity, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and abdominal fat loss.
A typical interval session alternates between hard efforts (80% to 95% of your max heart rate) and recovery periods. This might look like 30 seconds of all-out cycling followed by 90 seconds of easy pedaling, repeated for 20 minutes. Notably, adverse events in studies were actually slightly more common during moderate steady-state exercise than during intervals, suggesting that intensity itself isn’t inherently dangerous for most people.
That said, steady-state cardio still works. Not everyone enjoys pushing to near-maximum effort, and a brisk 45-minute walk five days a week will get you to the recommended 150 minutes without any complicated programming.
Strength Training Protects Against Aging
After about age 30, you lose roughly 3% to 8% of your muscle mass per decade, and the rate accelerates after 60. This progressive muscle loss, called sarcopenia, is a major driver of frailty, falls, and loss of independence. Strength training is the most effective way to slow and reverse it.
Guidelines for preserving muscle mass recommend resistance training at least three times per week at moderate to high intensity, performing 10 to 15 repetitions for 2 to 3 sets per exercise. You can use machines, free weights, or resistance bands. For building strength specifically, twice a week at a lighter intensity for at least 12 weeks produces measurable results.
Beyond muscle, strength training improves how your body handles blood sugar. When muscles contract under load, they activate transport proteins that pull glucose out of the bloodstream and into cells, independent of insulin. Over time, this process becomes more efficient as the body produces more of these transport proteins. This makes resistance training particularly valuable for anyone concerned about metabolic health or type 2 diabetes risk.
The Best Exercises for Bone Health
Not all exercise strengthens bones equally. Bone responds to mechanical loading, specifically to forces that exceed what you experience during normal daily activity. Activities that involve jumping and impact (basketball, volleyball, soccer, martial arts) produce the highest bone mineral density in athletes. Swimming, cycling, and rowing, while excellent for cardiovascular fitness, do relatively little for bones because they don’t generate significant ground reaction forces.
Walking falls somewhere in the middle. It can slow bone loss but doesn’t reverse it on its own because the load it places on the skeleton is only modestly above gravity. The most effective approach for maintaining bone density, particularly at the spine and hip, is a combination of impact exercise (jogging, jumping, stair climbing) with progressive resistance training. For the hip specifically, heavy lower-body strength exercises like squats and deadlifts appear to be the most effective single intervention.
Foundational Movement Patterns
Rather than thinking about individual exercises, it helps to think in terms of movement patterns. Nearly every physical task you perform falls into one of a few categories: squatting (sitting down and standing up), hinging at the hips (picking something off the floor), pushing (pressing a door open, getting up from the ground), pulling (rowing, opening a heavy door), carrying (groceries, luggage), and lunging (climbing stairs, stepping over obstacles).
Training each of these patterns ensures you build strength that transfers to real life. A simple weekly plan might include squats or lunges for your lower body, deadlifts or kettlebell swings for your hips and back, push-ups or overhead presses for pushing, rows or pull-ups for pulling, and loaded carries like walking with heavy bags. You don’t need dozens of exercises. One or two per pattern, performed with enough resistance to challenge you in the 8 to 15 rep range, covers the essentials.
Core Training and Back Pain
Core exercises deserve special attention because they directly affect whether you’ll deal with chronic low back pain, one of the most common reasons people stop exercising altogether. Research comparing core-specific training to general resistance training found that core work was more effective at reducing disability from chronic low back pain. The key distinction: training the deep trunk muscles (the ones that stabilize your spine before you move your arms or legs) produced better outcomes than training the superficial muscles you can see in a mirror.
Effective core exercises include planks, dead bugs, bird-dogs, and pallof presses. These train your midsection to resist unwanted movement rather than create it, which is what your core actually does during daily life. Programs in the research typically ran two to three sessions per week for six to eight weeks, with sessions lasting 30 minutes, and produced statistically significant improvements in both function and muscle thickness.
Exercise as a Treatment for Depression
One of the most compelling reasons to exercise has nothing to do with your body composition. A 2024 network meta-analysis in The BMJ compared exercise head-to-head with established depression treatments. Walking or jogging produced a moderate reduction in depressive symptoms (effect size of 0.62), which was larger than the effect of SSRIs alone (0.26) and comparable to cognitive behavioral therapy (0.55). Strength training also showed meaningful effects (0.49), as did mixed aerobic exercise (0.43).
This doesn’t mean exercise replaces therapy or medication for everyone, but it does mean that for mild to moderate depression, a consistent exercise habit produces effects that rival conventional treatments.
Putting It All Together
A well-rounded weekly routine doesn’t need to be complicated. Aim for 150 minutes of moderate cardio or 75 minutes of vigorous cardio, spread across however many days work for you. Add two to three strength training sessions covering all major movement patterns, and include some core-specific work. If you can incorporate impact activities like jumping rope, court sports, or jogging, your bones benefit too.
If that sounds like a lot, start smaller. People who go from doing nothing to doing even modest amounts of activity see the largest relative reduction in mortality risk. The jump from inactive to minimally active is more consequential than the jump from active to very active. Pick exercises you’ll actually do consistently, because the best exercise program is one you maintain for years, not weeks.