One of the most common questions exercise physiologists and personal trainers get is “what exercise is the best?” “Is running better than cycling?” “Should I be signing up for the closest Crossfit gym in my area?” “What about PX90?”

The answer is actually quite simple. It’s the exercise you enjoy enough to do again, and again, and again. If you are lucky enough to like them all, then do them all. Mix it up! Run on Saturday, bike on Monday, and do CrossFit on Wednesday.

The key to any exercise routine is to stick with it. If you want to be a better runner, you should run. If you want to be a better cyclist, you should cycle. If you want to improve your fitness then you need to pick an exercise that you can do at a level where you are breathing hard enough that makes it hard to talk. They call that, the “talk test.” If you can belt out a song while you are doing a routine, then it does not matter what you are doing, you are probably not going to see your fitness improve.

So what is the best exercise for you? It is the one you will enjoy and continue doing. If you are most interested in overall fitness and feel you have been training for a while with no improvements, consider scheduling a lactate performance test at the Salt Lake LiVe Well Center. A lactate test will help you modify your current routine so you can move on to that next level of performance.