What’s in style? The question doesn’t just relate to fashion. Indeed, even exercise styles go in and out of vogue, echoing trends fueled by social media and other cultural drivers.
Case in point: high-intensity bursts of exercise have grabbed headlines over the past couple of years, with scientists generating an array of studies examining the health benefits of short spurts of movement lasting from one to three minutes. That might consist of jumping jacks, lunges, running in place, jumping rope, air boxing, running up stairs, or any other high-intensity activity.
Meanwhile, plenty of research continues to focus on the health advantages of moderate-intensity, continuous movement. Mainstay choices for these sessions include brisk walking, cycling, jogging, and elliptical and treadmill use.
Given the swings in popularity between the differently paced alternatives, perhaps the most pressing question is which one is better for us. It might seem certain exercise patterns might prove superior to others, but we should resist the temptation to believe that, says Dr. Meagan Wasfy, a sports cardiologist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.
“There are always trends, and each one claims to be the latest and best way to move your body,” Dr. Wasfy says.
What health benefits does each approach offer? A sampling of recent studies and official health guidance weighs in.
Evidence supporting exercise bursts includes the following:
Evidence supporting longer, moderate-intensity exercise includes the following:
Sense a theme from the findings? Regardless of intensity, it’s apparent that any movement is good for your health.
“No one comes out ahead with regards to the long-term outcomes,” Dr. Wasfy says. “What matters most is moving your body and doing more of it. The sum of movement, over the course of a year or decades of your life, is what matters.”
One clear advantage to exercise bursts — or its cousin, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) — is that any high-intensity activity enables you to fulfill recommended exercise guidelines in less time. Health organizations advise adults to get at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise (or some equivalent combination of the two) per week. For an HIIT workout, you alternate vigorous, short sprints with brief periods of rest or lower-intensity movement.
“It’s a time-efficient way to get your recommended exercise dose in less time,” Dr. Wasfy says.
High-intensity exercise does pose a few drawbacks, however. These include a greater risk of injuries and inflammation to joints and muscles. Additionally, for people with heart disease or its risk factors, sudden bursts of exercise could be more likely to bring on new cardiac symptoms.
“If you’re writing an exercise prescription not knowing anything about someone’s health history, you’d write it for moderate-intensity, continuous exercise,” Dr. Wasfy says.
If you’d like to increase your exercise intensity but have existing heart disease — or symptoms such as chest pain with vigorous movement — talk to your doctor in advance. Older adults who’ve noticed their ability to exercise has declined should also speak up.
Ultimately, Dr. Wasfy says, you should choose a style of exercise you really like — and will do consistently — and disregard fitness trends. “If you’re healthy,” she says, “it’s really your choice.”
Image: © Luis Alvarez/Getty Images
Keeping your lower body strong and capable has many benefits, particularly for maintaining your mobility and independence into old age. Many of us also like having a muscular, toned lower body for the way it looks.
The good news is that whatever motivates you, you get both benefits, and this workout will improve strength and build lean muscle in your legs, all in just 20 minutes.
I recently witnessed an online melee as people debated the best way to perform a press-up: an exercise with an instruction booklet built into its name. Sure, there are nuances you can use to manipulate muscular engagement, but for the vast majority of people, simply pressing themselves away from the ground (kneeling or otherwise) will deliver most of the benefits.
This isn’t an isolated event either. Everywhere I look, people are seeking incremental health and fitness progress through (often expensive) hacks, shortcuts and supplements, all while leaving potentially huge gains on the table by overlooking the basics.
Regular sauna sessions in lieu of a good night’s sleep, a huge stack of pills where fruit and vegetables might suffice, and some new-fangled bosu ball exercise when a simple squat would deliver more bang for your buck.
I’m not saying these things are ineffective, but for the greatest impact on your health, you’re better off laying strong foundations first. Having interviewed some of the top researchers, coaches, trainers and athletes from across the fitness industry, I’ve identified the common denominators they all recommend for general good health.
From these, I have created six accessible, expert-led and actionable tips which you can use to become fitter than the majority of the population.
“Most of us have this mindset that more is better and we have to be absolutely perfect in everything,” says Sally Gunnell, former Olympic champion and founder of Life’s Hurdle. “But you can’t be perfect every day. That’s where exercise programmes and diets often go wrong.”
When people slip up and miss a day of their exercise plan, they often pack it all in. Failing to follow a diet’s strict rules regularly ends in a similar fate.
Gunnell likens this “all or nothing mindset” to getting a flat tyre, then slashing the other three. Instead, she recommends fixing the one that is broken by finding small ways to move your health and fitness in the right direction.
“If you miss a workout or overeat on one day, don’t throw the week away and say, ‘I’m going to start again on Monday’. Just go back to your normal [healthy] routine. Progress isn’t about perfection,” she says.
“I always think about red, amber and green days. Your green days are your good days, but often you might have a red day where you don’t feel like doing anything. On those days, is there one thing you can do that makes it an amber day?”
This might mean a short walk when you would otherwise have been scrolling on your phone, or a quick five minutes of movement (such as the short resistance training routine below) while taking a break from your desk.
A few minutes of effort might not seem significant enough to have an impact, but doing these activities regularly will quickly rack up compound interest for your fitness.
“It’s about being consistent, doing something when you can, and having a mindset where you’re not beating yourself up [if you don’t do everything perfectly],” Gunnell says. “That’s the key to long-term health and building it into your life.”
If we apply this to walking, step-based activity expert Dr Elroy Aguiar says the “ideal” baseline to hit for most health benefits is around 7,000-8,000 steps per day, with 20 to 30 minutes of walking at 100 to 130 steps per minute or faster.
However, he echoes the World Health Organisation’s sentiment that “every move counts towards better health”.
“If that means walking a little bit more quickly to your car, the train station or a bus stop, just to elevate your heart rate and your metabolic rate a little bit for those brief periods which you can accumulate throughout the day, those things count as well in terms of exercise,” Dr Aguiar says.
Broadly speaking, the body operates on a use it or lose it basis. If you do something regularly, it will adapt to do it better. If you stop doing something, it will gradually discard the strength, mobility and cardiorespiratory fitness required to do so. Therefore, if you want to be able to move freely, moving frequently is a non-negotiable.
Top strength coach Dan John identifies the five basic human movements as push, pull, hinge, squat and loaded carry.
Movement mechanics expert Ash Grossmann also highlights the importance of moving in all three planes of motion; sagittal, meaning up, down, forward and backward motions; frontal, meaning side-to-side actions such as bending; transverse, meaning twisting or rotational movements.
If you can cover these eight bases each week, whether that’s via strength training, pilates or any other activity you favour, your body is likely to feel more supple than most.
“We want to maintain as many movement options as possible, so that means moving as many joints as possible in as many directions as possible,” says Grossmann. “Doing things like side bends and rotations will all contribute to a body that feels limber and loose.”
Resistance training is the golden goose for health, fitness and longevity, offering an invariably cheaper entry fee and far greater return on investment than most biohacking options.
“In my opinion, the benefits of maintaining healthy muscle are highly underrated,” says Well To Lead founder Ollie Thompson, a trainer who specialises in longevity. “Consistent resistance exercise enhances metabolic function by improving insulin sensitivity, supports cardiovascular health by reducing blood pressure and inflammation, helps maintain hormonal balance to combat age-related decline, preserves bone density to reduce fracture risk and strengthens the immune system to help fight off disease.”
But resistance exercise doesn’t have to mean spending an hour in the gym every day.
Your muscles don’t know the difference between a dumbbell, barbell or bodyweight workout, they just recognise the need to overcome resistance. As long as an exercise is adequately challenging, it will prompt positive adaptations to strength and size, so time-savvy home workouts will serve most people just fine. And beginners can see significant improvements from minimal input.
“This is because any type of resistance training is a new stimulus to the body,” explains Amanda Capritto, a personal trainer who specialises in minimal equipment workouts. “A previously unstimulated neuromuscular and musculoskeletal system will respond quite dramatically to lower total training volumes and less intense stimuli, compared to the more advanced lifter [who will likely require more weight, intensity and volume in their workouts to see progress].”
To prove this point, a new 2025 study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that a five-minute resistance training workout comprising five beginner-friendly bodyweight exercises “significantly improved physical fitness and mental health in sedentary individuals” when performed daily for four weeks.
Fancy trying something similar? Then, every day or two, complete one round of the equipment-free circuit below:
One of the most common training mistakes is stagnation. People get stuck in a loop of doing the same exercises at the same weights for the same number of sets and reps every week.
But given the Said (specific adaptations to imposed demands) principle, in which the body only adapts to better handle the tasks we consistently ask of it, this is one-way traffic to a progress plateau. Instead, you need to gradually increase the challenge of your workouts via a process called progressive overload to continue to see benefits.
Take the five-minute workout above as a case study. For some people, it will present a challenge as written. For others, it may feel like a breeze.
If you’re in the latter camp and it requires less than a seven out of 10 effort, it’s time to increase the difficulty if you want to see progress. You can do this by performing the circuit multiple times, increasing the number of reps you perform of each exercise, increasing the weight you’re lifting (by adding items to the rucksack, and wearing it for the squats and press-ups) or switching to similar but more challenging variations of each exercise.
For example:
Nearly every fitness professional I’ve spoken to swears by the same first pillar for feeling better: improve your sleep. Dan Lawrence, a performance coach to elite athletes such as boxer Conor Benn, is the latest to lend weight to the argument.
“Sleep is the number one recovery tool, and it costs absolutely nothing,” he tells me. “If an athlete had a poor night’s sleep, we identify why. Have they eaten too late? Is their brain going at too fast a rate? Do we need to regulate autonomic status and breathing work? What’s gone on that’s led to poor sleep?”
The problem is, most of us aren’t elite athletes. We have early morning alarms, social commitments and unforeseen interruptions which impact our nightly slumber. However, Lawrence’s points still stand: the aim is to optimise the time we do spend in bed.
He recommends keeping your room cool and finding a sleep set-up that works for you – during Conor Benn’s training camp before his Chris Eubank Jr fight, Lawrence sprang into action after identifying a “pillow issue” which was hampering the star’s sleep.
The Sleep Scientist founder Dr Sophie Bostock also prescribes prioritising consistent sleep and wake times where possible. This will help keep you in sync with your circadian rhythm, helping your various bodily systems run smoothly.
Accessing bright natural light first thing in the morning, leaving a few hours before dinner and bedtime, and finding a way to destress before bed (such as meditation or journaling) can also improve your sleep quality.
The final step when building the base of the fitness pyramid is nutrition. But again, we’re not elite athletes, so you don’t have to weigh everything you eat and take all the fun out of food.
Instead, a few sustainable habits are likely to push the nutrition needle in the right direction, with dramatic carryovers to how you feel and perform.
“Picking some solid nutritional foundations to get better at is a good place to start, even if it’s just one or two things,” says Everything Fat Loss author Ben Carpenter. “Hopefully, they should become easier over the next few months, rather than you following a strict diet for four weeks, then stopping.”
The first foundation he recommends is “focusing on [consuming] nutritious foods rather than high-calorie, ultra-processed foods”.
“If you focus more on nutritious food, it’s building a habit rather than severing one,” he explains. “A lot of diets are focused on restriction and avoidance: you’re not allowed to eat certain things, or you have to reduce your intake of xyz.
“I like focusing on nutritious foods you can add in. They tend to have a habit of displacing other foods out of your diet because appetite is finite.”
Another thing you can do is create a favourable food environment which promotes positive nutrition choices. This can benefit everyone from office workers to elite athletes, as Manchester City Women’s physical performance lead Dan McPartlan explains.
“The eating environment is really important; trying to make the right foods appealing to the players, and buying food that they really want to eat.
“We’ve had a big focus on post-match food over the last few years. When I first arrived, we had little boxes of food that we would put in the microwave at the back of the bus after a game. We now have one of the chefs from the academy who travels with us, and he will cook fresh pasta at the back of the bus.”
If a private pasta specialist isn’t an option, Carpenter says there are easier ways to achieve this.
Try keeping nutritious food options in more accessible spots than less nutritious options. For example, boiled eggs instead of snack bars or fruit on your desk, rather than a communal high-calorie treats like biscuits.
It’s far from a straight swap, granted, but you’re more likely to make positive choices if it is easier to do so.
IT WASN’T UNTIL my first child arrived in October 2024 that I realized time really is a commodity we fail to appreciate. Every day leading up to the big day, I navigated a schedule of writing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, cooking, reading, vegetating, and walking with my very pregnant wife. I was able to commit to a rigorous 28-day workout program, by the end of which I got as lean as I’ve ever been (which you can read about here).
Then, overnight, I found myself couch-bound by a blobular being who sleep-drooled and farted on my chest as I binged the X-Men movies. Every. Single. Day. I ate whatever visitors stuffed into our fridge, slept in two-hour intervals, and lifted sporadically. Any attempt at me-time felt selfish and logistically impossible, but the lack of it took a toll on my physical and mental health.
It wasn’t until months later, after my son was sleeping for more than two-hour stretches at night, that my head was above water. The time felt right to recommit to a new workout program. I chose Men’s Health’s Dad Bod Arm Shred plan because it looked time-efficient, and let’s be real: bigger arms are always a fun and easy target to chase in the gym.
GET THE WORKOUT PLAN PDF
The workout showed me that I could get a lot of effective work done in a short amount of time. The programming was also fun, which made sticking to it easy. You can easily follow this plan for eight, 12, or even 16 weeks, and I’d advocate for anyone (not just dads), looking for a new challenge to give this one a go.
THIS FOUR-WEEK plan was written by Men’s Health contributor, certified strength coach, and fellow dad Andrew Heffernan, CSCS. Knowing a parent developed this plan eased my mind. I didn’t want to commit to a regimen that would force me to overreach, fall short, and retreat back into myself, and I felt confident that wouldn’t happen since Heffernan has been where I am. Here’s a quick breakdown of the four-week plan:
To access the full workout PDF, you just need to sign up for a Men’s Health MVP Premium membership, which includes tons of other dad-friendly workout programs, like Shred Your Dad Bod and Dad Bod Shred.
GET THE WORKOUT PLAN PDF
Twice a week, I’d strap my son into his bouncer, hand him his dumbbell-shaped rattles, and he’d watch me train. For the other workouts, I’d hand him off to my wife as I headed to my local big box gym.
My favorite aspects of this program were its accessibility and expeditiousness. If I hustled, I could get through each workout in about 30 minutes. Plus, I only needed a pair of adjustable dumbbells and an adjustable weight bench for three of the four workouts, so it was simple for me to do at home. (On day four, you’ll need an air bike, a kettlebell, and a pull-up bar.)
The gym has always been a social and emotional outlet, a place to interact with people and release some steam. Babies fill you with love, but the early newborn months were, for me, a constant spring of anxiety. I worried about every odd breath my son took (babies make many weird sounds). I worried about my wife, who woke every couple of hours in the night to feed the baby. I worried about neither of us having time to ourselves. And yet, leaving to do anything, even for an hour, felt like a betrayal of the people who needed me. The gym made me feel good, but now I was speeding through reps of curls and squats, worrying, worrying, worrying about how long I’d been away from home. Thankfully, this program accounted for my lack of time.
This program challenged my perception of arm training and forced me to face an uncomfortable truth: I’ve never trained arms hard. Now, as a dad with only a few hours a week to spare for the gym, I was stimulating my arms more than I ever have while spending less time in the gym. Realizing that less sometimes is more (assuming you work hard) was worth the four-week commitment.
The trio of relatively small muscles that make up your arms—the biceps, triceps, and deltoids—are onerous to grow. That’s been my experience, at least. But after the first workout, my biceps felt exceptionally sore, which rarely happens, and then sore after each subsequent workout. I’m not a personal trainer or strength coach, but I imagine this newfound soreness is due to two factors: volume and intensity.
It’s not a concrete rule, but more volume typically means more growth (assuming you’re not accumulating a ton of “junk” sets). Throughout the program, I accumulated 50 direct sets for my biceps and 52 for my triceps, not including the ancillary volume that comes from chin-ups, rows, pushups, and presses. I was able to squeeze in this much volume thanks to supersets—a common intensity technique where you perform two exercises back to back with no rest between sets. If you’re a dad who can’t afford to spend over an hour in the gym, supersets are a terrific way to pack more volume into a shorter workout, and you can apply them to any muscle.
I’ve trained long enough to know when I’m pushing my sets hard or not. Typically, I leave three or four reps in the tank for my arms, focusing on establishing a mind-muscle connection. This time, I adopted a new training style: heavy weights for every set. If a set of incline curls called for 15 reps, I’d use a pair of dumbbells that I can curl for 10 reps. Once I hit failure, I’d rest for about 10 seconds and finish the set. I was tackling my arm sets with the same ferocity that I’d apply to heavy rows or deadlifts, and I plan on bringing this intensity into all of my future arm workouts.
If I was skeptical of anything, it’s that I’d keep my strength (or what was left of it) on only four, half-hour-long workouts, two of which target the arms. I was happy to be wrong.
For the Full-Body Big Lifts day, you perform two supersets—one consisting of the rear-foot-elevated split squat and dumbbell row and the other of the dumbbell bench press and dumbbell Romanian deadlift. The price to pay for such efficiency was grueling sets, lifting as much weight as my body could handle for every set of each movement. I rowed a 100-pound dumbbell, performed RDLs with 105-pounders, pressed 65 pounds on the incline bench, and held a 60-pound dumbbell in each hand for split squats. Because the program is arm-focused, you’re not expected to hit your chest, back, and legs with appreciable volume. You do, however, have to train these muscles hard. I rarely looked forward to this DOMs-inducing amalgamation, but it reminded me that effective workouts don’t have to be long and complicated.
If there was a workout I wanted to skip—and seriously considered skipping in week four—it was the Full-Body Muscle Circuit. After a full day of daddy daycare and a week of workouts, I begrudgingly plowed through an enervating circuit of compound exercises such as chinups, walking lunges, and hand-elevated pushups. Like during the other full-body day, I kept my reps and weight as high and heavy as possible, holding 50-pound dumbbells for walking lunges and cranking through 15 dead hang chinups on my first set.
YOU CAN LOSE a substantial amount of weight in four weeks. Gaining muscle mass, however, is a long-haul effort that takes at least eight to 12 weeks before you notice significant results. Still, I ended up with what looked like fuller shoulders while maintaining my weight and waistline (177 lbs and 31.5”). I also feel more energized now that I’m back into a consistent exercise routine. But I don’t measure the success of this routine in inches or pounds.
The newborn stage was tough. When people find out you’re expecting, they say you’ll feel an indescribable love for your child when he arrives. It’s hard to connect with when you hear it, but that feeling is real and, at times, all-consuming. When my son first smiled at me, my body pulsed with raw emotion that is, at least in my experience, rarer to come by as we age. As you get older, you become desensitized to your surroundings. You don’t experience many “firsts”. With my son, each day is full of them—his first roll; his first laugh, his first head bump (sorry, buddy). If there’s a magic quality about kids, it’s that, through them, you get to experience the mundane anew through fresh eyes.
However, what these parents don’t mention are the trade-offs of caring for a newborn. You are stripped of your autonomy, and your wants no longer come first. The baby sleeps on you for hours at a time. They eat every two hours. They vomit on every shirt you dare to wear around them. If you want to sit down with a pizza and watch your favorite show at the end of your week, expect to check in on them every 10 minutes while your food goes cold and your patience runs thin. Then prepare to feel like a terrible parent for getting frustrated that your food got cold and your patience ran thin. You and your partner will be around each other 24 hours a day, but will hardly interact as one sleeps and the other watches the baby. You are two ships passing in the night.
So, yeah, forget my arms. Completing 16 workouts in a month was my success, and this program helped me achieve this consistency with manageable and fun workouts. What did I gain, if not pounds of new muscle tissue? The confidence to return to the gym and a new set of tools to help me balance fitness and fatherhood.
Andrew Gutman, NASM-CPT is a journalist with a decade of experience covering fitness and nutrition. His work has been published in Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, Muscle & Fitness, and Gear Patrol. Outside of writing, Andrew trains in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, helps coach his gym’s kickboxing team, and enjoys reading and cooking.
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