What is the Single Best Exercise?

This a bit of a trick question — but your answer will make all the difference.

What is the single best exercise you can do? It is the one YOU will stick to, consistently. That could be anything, either aerobic or anaerobic: lifting weights, tai chi, hiking, swimming, running. etc. ad infinitum, you get the point. If you have a passion for it, that’s your single best exercise.

But it’s a loaded question, and there is a bit more advice here than, “Just do what works for you,” because that even breaks down for us at times. I have been a chronic exerciser, which is one reason I wanted to write a blog on exercise. I’ve tried just about everything. In fact, at times in my life it’s been close to an addiction, as I spoke about on podcasts with two of the world’s foremost experts (Dr. Gabor Maté here and Dr. Anna Lembke here). I’ve run, too many times to count, until I’ve gotten physically sick. I’ve lifted until I fainted. I’ve sprinted until I passed out. So while that “worked for me” as far as a passion — I have two of the leading addiction experts saying, “Maybe that isn’t really healthy, even if you could stick to it.”

There is a paradox of sorts, then. What works for us might not stay the same, and it might not even be healthy at all times. So I’d like to add something very important, that has taken me 50 years of this life to learn.

Further > Faster

Sustainable > Record-Setting

Personal Achievement > Public Victory

I was thinking of all three of these as I ran 5 miles at high altitude the other morning. It felt good to go slow but far. It felt good to make it to the top of a mountain without anyone knowing or caring about my time. In fact, it felt great that I wasn’t timing myself at all.

Exercise — unlike, say, sleep or food intake (sleep, for example, is a U-shape as far as help; too little or too much correlates strongly with increased all-cause morbidity) — is monotonic. The more you do it, the healthier you will be. The more you exercise and move, the more all-cause morbidity is decreased. Which answers the question, in part — what is the single best exercise? It is the one you are passionate about that you will do. But I have learned from running on a stress fracture for 6 months that there is a huge caveat to this all. The single best exercise, then, is both the one you will do and can do consistently. For life. Find a passion, for sure, but pace yourself.

If you are doing it today, and next year, then ten years from now with the same enjoyment—that is the single best exercise you can do.