As a dog owner and a fitness writer, I do a lot of walking. While testing out some of the best walking shoes recently, I wondered whether or not my stroll counted as a workout. My heart rate was elevated and I was breaking a sweat but I wasn’t sure I was doing enough to improve my cardio fitness.

I decided to speak to NASM-certified personal trainer, Ellen Thompson, the head personal trainer at Blink Fitness NYC. Not only did I want to know if walking is technically cardio, but I wanted to find out if there was a minimum pace I needed to hit to turn my walk into a cardio workout.

Walking has earned a reputation as a great form of exercise that’s easy and accessible for many people, and scores of studies show the popular activity has numerous health benefits, too.

Getting at least 2,300 steps per day reduces your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, according to one study published in a 2023 edition of the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

In addition, weight-bearing exercises such as walking help prevent osteoporosis, according to another study published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Yet some experts in the health and fitness fields assert that while walking is certainly good for your health and fitness, it’s not really high-quality exercise. One such expert is Melissa Boyd, a certified personal trainer and coach with Tempo, an online personal training platform. Boyd is based in San Francisco.

“Our lives have gotten so busy — we commute, sit all day, then are exhausted at night — that getting a short walk in makes you feel like you’ve done this big, exponential thing,” Boyd said. “But walking is really a baseline movement your body requires to function well, to help with things like circulation and digestion, and to decompress.”

To help her clients better understand why a daily walk won’t result in a beach body — something many of them believe, thanks to various social media influencers — she discusses with them the three types of movement that are beneficial for overall health and fitness.

First is the movement your body is owed or requires every day, such as walking, stretching and bending. Second is athletic movement, which you can do a few times a week to improve your fitness or to train for a sport. Third is social movement that you do for fun or to connect with others, such as dancing or playing volleyball.

“It’s important to think of movement in these different categories because not moving throughout the day has become normalized,” Boyd said. “Our lives are so sedentary, many of us are trying to dig ourselves out of a movement deficit. But exercise is different from physical movement.”

Our bodies need to move in many different ways

Walking is great, but it’s just one, unidirectional form of movement, and our bodies need more to be functionally fit, said Dr. Carl Cirino, a sports medicine surgeon at HSS Orthopedics with Stamford Health in Connecticut.

People use the muscles and tendons in their bodies to assist with all the bending, twisting and rotating they do in their daily lives, Cirino said, so they need to work and stretch them in many different directions. Yoga and Pilates are two activities that are very effective and healthy in this regard, he said.

“Stretching is also incredibly easy, and something you can do when you wake up and before you go to bed,” Cirino said.

Having loose, pliable muscles also means you will have more balance and stability, which helps prevent falls and injuries in all physical activities, he said. It’s also good to get your heart rate up several times a week for cardiovascular health.

Time for an exercise snack

Ideally, you should create a plan that incorporates daily “owed” movements, such as walking and stretching, with some cardiovascular work, strength training and social activity sprinkled throughout the week, the two said. That can seem overwhelming for many, however.

Breaking down all these different movements into exercise snacks is one way to sneak in the movement your body needs, Boyd said.

“Maybe get a walking pad and do some of your meetings while walking slowly on the pad,” she said. “Maybe every time you go to the bathroom, you do 20 squats, or every time you get water, you do 10 push-ups against a wall. If you attach these exercise snacks to something else you’re already doing, you can make it more of a habit. I’ve seen huge success with this.”

Boyd also encourages her clients to find some form of movement they enjoy that doesn’t seem like a workout, such as playing kickball or pickleball. That way, you’re having fun and being social while getting fitter.

Cirino agrees. “We see kids here in sports medicine whose parents want them to play baseball, but they don’t want to do it,” he said. “It’s the same with exercise. You need to find something that’s interesting and easy — maybe an activity your friends are doing — and use that as the basis to build good habits.”

Start slowly and build from there

Rethinking exercise as regular movements your body needs for functionality, fitness and social connection also can be a means of giving yourself permission to carve out time for working out, Boyd said.

It’s also helpful to keep in mind that creating an exercise plan doesn’t require an immediate, massive change in your lifestyle. In fact, it’s better to start slowly with new, little chunks of movement.

“What I usually see is that people love the way this starts to make them feel,” Boyd said. “Then the stronger they become, the more they want to move even more. Movement inspires movement.”

Melanie Radzicki McManus is a freelance writer who specializes in hiking, travel and fitness.

“You have never seen women with bodies like this,” she told me as we drove to the Motivate Studio in Silverlake in January 2022. And it was true: the women in the studio did have amazing bodies in their very shiny, very tight pastel leggings and bra tops; lean and muscular and pert. A bit like Barbie. “If you did this three times a week, you’d look like one of them,” my sister told me. “I very much doubt that,” I replied.

Lagree Fitness is sort of like Reformer Pilates, but on potent steroids. Like Reformer, the exercises are done on a machine, in this case the Megaformer, which sounds like it might be a dinosaur. The Megaformer has two carriages, multiple straps, pulleys and intensity levels, as well as numbers that indicate where you must put your hands and feet for torturous planks, wobbly gliding lunges and impossible pulses. One must transition from one move to the next in a matter of seconds, which requires ungodly dexterity and reflexes. There are no rest periods in the 45-minute class, the aim being to reach a point where your muscles are trembling and you are begging for mercy. I reached this point pretty fast, unable to keep up with my sleek gym companions as they crunched and pulled and pushed. “Go, G,” the instructor shouted. “You’ve got this,” she continued. I really did not. I nearly cried with relief when she announced that we had only 20 seconds to go. It felt like 20 hours.

My sister had warned me that my muscles would ache the next day. I didn’t expect that I would be so sore I would not be able to walk. Which was a minor issue as I was flying home since I had to hobble through LAX. It felt like someone had stripped my calf muscles from my legs, rolled them into solid little balls, then reattached them.

Yet I was intrigued. My sister’s words, “You could have a body like that” replayed in my mind like a motivational mantra as I ploughed through the complimentary pretzels on the flight back. When I got home I looked up Lagree Fitness. The “method” was founded in 1998 by a man called Sebastien Lagree, who, on his website, describes himself as a “visionaire”. Michelle Obama, Jennifer Aniston and the Duchess of Sussex are fans. According to the literature, Lagree Fitness is more like bodybuilding than Pilates, and the Megaformer more like an “advanced spaceship” than the classic Pilates reformer. This all sounded suitably impressive. The problem was, back in 2022, I couldn’t find anywhere in London to do Lagree Fitness. My total body transformation would have to wait.

Then I heard about Studio Fix, a gym that opened this year in Kensington. Here was a devoted Lagree Fitness studio. “Sculpt your physique in a modern, luxurious space,” the website suggested. OK then. The gym, which has three studios and also offers Barre, HIIT, yoga and boxing with wheelchair access, was designed by WGB architects and is suitably swanky, with a smoothie bar in reception and Dyson hairdryers in the changing rooms as well as a big tub of free hairbands. Always useful.

The Lagree studio is comfortingly dark, with nightclub lights, cool hotel-lobby music and lots of mirrors in which the other attendees, who did indeed have very sculpted physiques, could take photographs of themselves to impress their followers on social media. I explained to the instructress that, although I had attended one class before, I considered myself a relative newbie. She talked me through the rigorous complexities of the Megaformer, and we began.

Studio Fix was designed by WGB architects

Now, I am not a complete sloth. I do yoga twice a week, weights once a week and run a bit when the weather is temperate. But my God, within about three exercises I was already having to down-level because I just couldn’t manage, I didn’t have the core strength. Or the anything else strength. The instructress called out things like “Grab the Ring of Fire” and “In 20 seconds we will be doing the sexy back,” while I puffed and floundered. I sought comfort and camaraderie from the women to my left and right, but they were at it like machines. The pace was marginally slower than the LA equivalent, but still I mostly failed to keep up.

At the end of it all the instructress told me that I’d done well, adding that it was a tough workout. And for the next three days my stomach muscles were stinging and sore in a way they had never been from any other workout. But still, I think I’ll return. Something that tough surely should make a difference. And who doesn’t want a sexy back? Or indeed free hairbands?

www.studiofix.co.uk