Fitness advice loves a face-off: walking or Pilates, cardio or weights, HIIT or something lower impact. The catch is that no single workout wins every category, and turning movement into one more thing to optimize can make the whole process harder than it needs to be.
To cut through the noise, we asked Dr. Andy Galpin, scientist, elite performance coach, and executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University, to explain what each type of movement does well and how to choose based on your goal.
Before getting into the specifics, he starts with the part that matters most: do something you can stick with.
Don't let perfectionism kill your progress.
“We want people to just work out. That’s the win,” Dr. Andy says.
The most theoretically effective workout will not help if it makes you feel defeated or is impossible to maintain.
“If you are finding a program you can do, you can put effort into, and you can be consistent at, that is the biggest win.”
His concern is that absolute fitness advice can convince people that the movement they enjoy does not count, causing them to abandon something that was helping them stay active.
“I don’t want people thinking that they fail because they did something wrong.”
With that in mind, here’s how he breaks down what each type of workout is actually good for.
What “toned and sculpted” actually requires
“Toned” isn’t a physiological term, but Dr. Andy knows what people mean by it. Think: lean with visible muscle, minus the bulk. The surprising part is that no single workout style gets you there.
“What that functionally means is people are actually wanting a combination of being lean and having some muscle,” he says.
It comes down to two separate goals: getting lean enough for muscle to show and building enough muscle to see. Dr. Andy says nutrition plays the larger role in the first, while training helps develop the muscle.
“You can be as toned as you’d like, but if there’s a pillow of fat surrounding the muscle, then you can’t see it.”
If you feel lean but still don’t look defined, the fix isn’t a different workout style. It’s more muscle.
Which workouts support fat loss?
Despite what the 80s may have told us, cardio doesn’t have a monopoly here.
“All forms of exercise can work,” Dr. Andy says, and the biggest predictor of your success isn’t which one you pick. It’s which one you stick with. His recommendation for most people is to do one endurance session, one strength session, and one higher-intensity session per week.
Strength training may offer an advantage over time because it can add muscle, which can help support metabolism and long-term weight maintenance.
“The most effective way to increase your metabolism long term is to add muscle,” Dr. Andy explains. He says this helps explain why strength training can support fat-loss maintenance over time.
Strength Training: how to build muscle
Building muscle requires mechanical tension created through some form of strength training.
“You have to be able to create tension,” Dr. Andy says, whether that’s with barbells, bands, kettlebells, or your own bodyweight. For most people, he suggests training each muscle group about twice a week, ideally reaching 10 to 15 total working sets per muscle group across the week. He is also clear that five sets are better than none.
Contrary to a common myth, lighter weights can build as much muscle as heavier weights if you take the set sufficiently close to failure.
“For muscle growth, it can. No question,” Dr. Andy says. “You gotta train hard, though.”
The real catch is that most people misjudge what “hard” actually means. You don’t need to train to complete failure, but you do need to get close.
“As long as you’re getting into what we call one to two repetitions away from failure, that’s probably close enough,” he explains. Dr. Andy says a set that feels around 90 to 95% effort is “probably close enough.” If you are beyond the beginner stage and consistently finishing closer to 70 to 75%, you may need more volume or heavier resistance.
High-intensity intervals challenge your heart, lungs, vascular system, blood pressure, and muscles in ways lower-intensity exercise does not. They can also deliver that stimulus in a short window of time.
“It gives you unique advantages over anything else because it gives you a stimulus and a stressor you can’t get in other places,” Dr. Andy says. It’s also efficient, which makes it realistic to fit in, even during busy weeks.
A very short HIIT session needs to be sufficiently intense to create the intended adaptation. If the session is both short and relatively easy, it may not provide enough volume or intensity to do that. On a day when a truly hard interval workout feels unrealistic, Dr. Andy would rather you choose a lower-intensity exercise and get the work in.
Timing can matter, too. Dr. Andy says hard intervals late in the evening can interfere with sleep if your heart rate does not come down and your body has trouble returning to a calm state, particularly after an already stressful day. He considers two to three HIIT sessions per week manageable for most people. Truly hard sessions every day may exceed someone’s ability to recover, particularly as their fitness and training intensity increase.
Walking: does it count as a workout?
Dr. Andy generally separates everyday walking from structured exercise, but that does not mean he dismisses its value. “Walking is a physical activity. It’s great, it’s tremendous.”
He points to step-count research as evidence that everyday movement matters: “It is impactful. It matters. The more you move around, the generally healthier you’re going to be across the spectrum.”
The distinction is whether an activity is helping maintain your current health and capacity or challenging your body enough to create new fitness adaptations.
“It’s not really an effective driver of adaptation. It’s not going to do a ton there, but it’s pretty good at keeping things alive and moving.”
That is also why he does not think walking needs to become another workout to optimize.
“You should think about walking as something that you’re doing kind of as a default as often as you can.”
Taking the stairs or pacing during a phone call counts. And if walking is the only movement someone can currently do because of an injury, limitation, or simply where they are mentally, Dr. Andy is clear that it is still a major win.
Pilates: can it build muscle?
Pilates can absolutely have a place in a well-rounded routine. What it can do depends partly on the style and intensity of the workout. It can build muscular endurance and contribute to muscle growth, particularly in certain areas.
“For a lot of people, it can help with muscle growth a little bit.” He also outlines where Pilates tends to work especially well: “Pilates tends to be pretty good for hips, glutes, potentially back, shoulders, certainly triceps.”
Its limitation is progressive overload. Some muscle groups, particularly the upper back, can be difficult to challenge through heavier vertical or horizontal pulling movements in a traditional Pilates routine.
“There’s just a lot of muscle groups that can’t effectively be targeted.” That does not make Pilates ineffective, “but if your main goal is to maximize muscle growth, that would not be the optimal routine,” says Dr. Andy.
Should you do cardio or strength training first?
According to Dr. Andy, either lifting first or doing cardio first is fine, generally speaking, but the right call depends on your primary goal and what you actually mean by “cardio.”
A 10-minute elliptical warm-up before lifting is a non-issue. Running 10 miles before a lifting session is a different story. If your main goal is strength or muscle, that much pre-lifting fatigue works against you. If running is the priority and lifting is there to support it, doing it in that order makes sense.
How to choose a workout for stress relief and mood a boost
Dr. Andy’s answer here is highly personal. “What do you walk out of and go, ‘I feel way better now’?”
Tai chi, pickleball, jiu-jitsu, or ninety minutes on deltoids, whatever leaves you feeling better when you finish.
“People that love lifting weights feel great after spending an hour and a half just on their deltoids,” he says. “And then some people would be like, that’s the worst, most boring s*** ever.”
When should you ignore fitness advice?
One piece of social media advice Dr. Andy wants people to question is the absolute claim that an exercise “doesn’t work” or that everyone should stop doing it.
“Any big generalization like that is almost guaranteed to be unscientifically founded,” he says. He advises watching for the “who” behind the claim before you toss out what’s already working for you. Advice designed around one person’s goal, sport, profession, or physical limitation may not apply to everyone else.
The biggest win is finding movement you can do consistently. For well-rounded fitness, Dr. Andy recommends combining strength training, longer-duration endurance work, higher-intensity exercise, walking, and activities you enjoy. But if the ideal mix is not realistic right now, the workout you can sustain still counts. Do not quit something that is working for you just because social media says you are doing it wrong.
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