What's the Best Cardio Exercise?

The honest answer is: the one you’ll actually do.

I know that sounds like a cop-out, but stick with me for a minute, because it’s genuinely the whole answer and most people blow right past it looking for something more complicated.

The fitness industry has a vested interest in making you believe there’s a magic modality. HIIT. Zone 2. VO2 max intervals. Incline walking. Fasted cardio. All of it gets packaged and marketed like the secret you’ve been missing. But if you’re a guy in his 50s who’s trying to lose some weight and get his body moving again, the question isn’t which type of cardio burns the most calories in a lab. The question is what are you going to show up for three or four times a week, month after month.

For me, that’s the treadmill and the elliptical.

On the treadmill I walk at around 3.5 miles per hour with a decent incline. That gets my heart rate up past 120 beats per minute. It’s not glamorous. It’s not the kind of thing you post a video of. But I can do it for 45 minutes, sometimes an hour, without dreading it or wrecking myself in the process.

The elliptical is my other go-to, and the reason is simple: zero joint stress. My ankles and knees feel nothing. That matters a lot more at 56 than it did at 30, and if you’re in the same neighborhood, you know exactly what I mean.

Now, I want to say something about HIIT, because it’s everywhere and a lot of guys think it’s the gold standard. High intensity interval training will spike your heart rate and burn calories in a compressed window of time. The science is real. But for most men our age, the recovery cost is higher than people talk about. I’ve done it. What I found was that I was torched afterward, my body needed more recovery time between sessions, and the cumulative fatigue started interfering with everything else I was doing. When I switched to steady state cardio, my recovery improved dramatically. I felt better the next morning. I could train more consistently. And consistency is the whole game.

That’s not to say HIIT is wrong for everyone. If you love it and you’re recovering well, keep going. But if you’ve been grinding through intervals because someone told you it was optimal and you’re running on fumes, give yourself permission to slow down and do something sustainable.

A few other things worth mentioning: rowing machines are excellent and underused. A stationary or recumbent bike is great if that suits you. Swimming is one of the best full body, joint-friendly workouts you can do, and if you have access to a pool and you enjoy it, it’s hard to beat. The common thread across all of it is low impact, manageable intensity, and something you can repeat.

The trap a lot of people fall into is thinking that harder is always better. At our age, harder often just means longer recovery, more soreness, and a higher chance of skipping the next session. The guy doing moderate cardio four times a week is running laps around the guy who did one brutal HIIT session and took a week to recover.

Find the thing that gets your heart rate up, that you can do consistently, and that doesn’t leave you wrecked. That’s your best cardio exercise.

Everything else is just noise.

If you’re not sure what’s actually getting in the way for you, the Reset Scorecard is a good place to start. It takes about three minutes and gives you something real to work with. You can find it at resetwithtom.com/scorecard.