DOES WALKING COUNT as exercise? There’s a good chance this wasn’t on your mind on your last evening walk. But if you thought of that walk as a workout (or even if you didn’t), you were quietly taking a stance on a heated fitness discourse. The benefits of walking have been trending in fitness circles for a while now, and not everyone is sold on its greatness—or how exactly walking fits into a healthy lifestyle.
Welcome to the most underrated workout debate of recent memory. On X, influencer Max Lugavere recently said he rates walking as a form of exercise, and a “ten out of ten” for general health. That led run-fluencer Brady Holmer to argue walking is great but “massively overrated.
Naturally, that touched off a firestorm of comments on X. Many people cited their own health, pointing to walking habits of 10 or even 25K steps daily. Others agreed, saying the bar is set too low if someone finds walking the best form of cardio. Even Andrew Huberman had to weigh in, saying walking is “necessary but not sufficient.” He also tacked on another hot take: 7,000 steps a day is not enough to check off as exercise for the day.
A host of voices have since weighed in on the topic, and that’s made one thing clear: Not even trainers agree on the role of walking in your training. There’s a reason for that, says MH fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, CSCS. “For some populations, it can definitely be a workout,” he says. “For others, it’s not. Much of it depends on where you are on your fitness journey. There’s no downside to walking as an activity, but it isn’t a workout for everyone.”
Is it a workout for you? To understand this, we asked 4 trainers for their takes on when walking is considered exercise and when it doesn’t.
What Even Qualifies as Exercise?
TO UNDERSTAND WHETHER walking is a workout, you first need to understand what exercise is. Exercise and activity aren’t the same thing, says Samuel. “Activity is any movement we do,” says Samuel. “Exercise, however, is activity that overloads one of our body’s systems in an effort to create an adaptation.”
Those adaptations are often in pursuit of muscle growth, strength, or aerobic improvement; basically, your fitness goals. And not every goal benefits from walking, as these four trainers explain below.
Domenic Angelino
DOMENIC ANGELINO, MS, MPH, CSCS, personal trainer and chief exercise scientist at FitCraft, has consulted for multiple fitness apps and universities like Johns Hopkins School of Medicine on how to optimize exercise programs. For Angelino, walking can serve as the backbone for a fitness regimen if done correctly.
“The differentiating factor is really whether it’s intentional and structured,” he says. “Physical activity is really just any movement you do that involves just burning calories, which inherently happens whenever you move because you need to heal the muscles that are responsible for moving your body.”
One of the biggest goals with walking, according to Angelino, is to help the heart get better at pumping blood. This is monitored through stroke volume, the amount of blood the left ventricle can pump to working tissues. “You can improve heart health and your heart’s ability to deal with demands imposed on it,” he says. “Very short bursts of low-intensity activity can reduce mortality and [heart] disease risk.”
Pat Davidson
EXERCISE PHYSIOLOGIST AND strength coach Dr. Pat Davidson sums his answer simply: all exercise is movement, but not all movement is exercise.
“Movement is exercise if it is planned, intentional, programmed, aimed at being progressed, and has a time-encapsulated goal,” he says. Someone walking to catch the bus or to mow the lawn, for example, is not exercise, because it’s not planned and would not be progressed.
That’s where walking becomes questionable as “exercise” for anyone with a high level of fitness: Since it’s a low-intensity activity, Davidson also finds it lacks the sufficient intensity to serve as cardio for an athletic individual. A leisure walk might land you around Zone 1, where your heart rate is around 50 to 60 percent of its maximum rate – if it even reaches that. This might not even get close to your typical warmup or cooldown heart rate, depending on how you train.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth walking. Davidson says everyone—regardless of fitness level—should walk daily for the other health benefits. “Accumulation of a threshold number of daily steps per day, somewhere around 8,000, has an impressive statistical association with decreased mortality, and reduced disease state,” says Davidson. “There are very few interventions that have the cross-board set of health improvements other than threshold daily walking.”
Mario Mejia
“WHEN IT’S INTENTIONAL, that’s when walking becomes a form of exercise,” says Mario Mejia, PT, DPT, physical therapist at Next Play Physical Therapy & Performance. When you step out your front door for a walk with a plan, you’ll likely wind up trying to work in different intensity levels throughout the walk. And that can turn a leisurely activity into a heart-pumping workout, if you’re tracking that walk closely.
Mejia regularly sees clients who are recovering from injuries. He’s found that walking for cardio is a more beneficial recommendation for people with lower fitness levels. For example, guys who hit the gym five to six days a week will likely see little gains from walking 7,000 steps.
“Physiologically, you have increased your vital capacity,” he says. “Someone who is less trained typically will carry less oxygen to those muscles, therefore fatiguing them much quicker than someone who has built tolerance to a standard activity like walking.”
Age, along with fitness level, can factor in on whether walking qualifies as an appropriate exercise. Mejia likes to recommend walking for his older clients because of how much the activity helps in lowering the risk of heart disease. “Right now, that’s the number one killer in the US,” he says. “Heart disease can happen anytime but as we age, physiologically there are differences in the heart, lungs, and bone structure.”
Older adults tend to see skeletal muscle changes as they get older, and Mejia says the changes are more drastic for an older adult who is inactive. For these cases, he steers his older patients toward walking as it’s a well-rounded approach to improving balance and meeting aerobic demands without shocking their system.
Mejia says walking, at the very least, can act as a gateway to exercise. “Walking is so accessible and cost-effective that it’s an easy segue for people to start moving their bodies,” he says.
Kyle Sanchez
“I THINK THAT intensity is probably the most important part that is going to separate the two,” says Kyle Sanchez, PT, DPT, CSCS, physical therapist at Bespoke Physical Therapy. Sanchez trains people from a variety of fitness levels and he often instructs his clients who like to walk to experiment with parameters like the 6-6-6 challenge or the 12-3-30 method (if you have access to a treadmill). Both can provide a new adaptation to your muscles. “If you have a certain goal and you’re working at the right intensity, that’s going to be the difference between walking home from the grocery store and walking as physical activity.”
Your walk may look different depending on your activity level and walking intensity. That’s OK. Regarding the X thread, Sanchez acknowledges there were some definite ragebaiters who made valid points when walking doesn’t count as exercise. But the argument is lost when people with advanced fitness knowledge do not elaborate on why 7,000 steps may qualify as exercise for one person and not another.
“That’s not the kind of community or culture that we should be trying to cultivate,” he says. “Exercise can be meaningful for everyone, from a bodybuilder to that 75-year-old who just doesn’t want to fall and break their head.”
Jocelyn Solis-Moreira, MS is the associate health & fitness for Men’s Health and has previously written for CNN, Scientific American, Popular Science, and National Geographic before joining the brand. When she’s not working, she’s doing circus arts or working towards the perfect pull-up.
