Kamal Ghorui
Ever wondered what Americans do to stay fit? If you guessed pilates, kickboxing, barre, yoga, or strength training, you’d be wrong. Americans have finally spoken, and their favourite leisure-time physical activity is surprisingly simple: walking!This low-effort habit is quietly becoming America’s favourite workoutThis low-effort habit is quietly becoming America’s favourite workoutA comprehensive new study reveals that nearly half of US adults choose walking over every other recreational activity out there—from yoga to weightlifting to dance. However, there is a twist: not everyone doing it is actually getting the health benefits they think they are. The study findings are published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
Walking tops the list of leisure-time physical activity in the US
The study found that walking was, by far, the most popular leisure-time physical activity among US adults. There was also a difference between rural and urban populations. Rural residents enjoyed gardening, hunting, and fishing, while urban residents were more interested in running, weightlifting, and dancing. However, urban residents are more likely to meet physical activity guidelines than rural residents.The US Department of Health and Human Services has published guidelines on recommended amounts of aerobic and muscle-strengthening physical activity for adults. Though the proportion of adults meeting these guidelines has increased in recent decades, certain populations continue to fall short, including adults living in rural areas. Understanding differences in preferred recreational physical activities could help inform efforts to reduce such disparities.However, only a few studies have analysed urban versus rural preferences for leisure-time physical activities and how they relate to meeting guidelines.
The study
The researchers wanted to address that gap, and they analysed telephone survey data collected from a national sample of 396,261 US adults in 2019.Out of 75 survey options for leisure-time physical activities, walking turned out to be the most popular among both urban and rural residents. A total of 44.1% of people reported walking as the activity they spent the most time on. These findings echo a similar study of US data collected in 2011. However, further analysis of 2019 data found that even among walkers, only one in four (25%) met the combined guidelines for aerobic and muscle-strengthening physical activity, while 22% did not meet either guideline.The researchers also explored the popularity of other activities. In rural areas, most people engaged in gardening, hunting, fishing, and farm work, while urban residents had higher participation in running, weightlifting, bicycling, and dance. Despite this, rural residents were generally less active and less likely to meet guidelines for aerobic or muscle-strengthening physical activity.
A call for a solution
These findings are crucial, as they call for tailored interventions to boost physical activity that are culturally and demographically appropriate.“We expected to see that walking would continue to be the most common physical activity. However, it was surprising to see that nearly one in four adults who walk as their main activity did not meet either of the physical activity guidelines. That is, they reported less than the recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity and fewer than the recommended two days per week of muscle-strengthening activity, such as yoga or exercises with resistance bands,” Christiaan Abildso, the lead researcher, said.“What we might be seeing in these rural–urban differences in preferences may just reflect what people have access to or what is culturally supported. In our work, we see a need to continue to support our partners in small towns and rural places by creating physical, social, and cultural conditions that support physical activity. This could mean creating a wide shoulder on a country road for running and cycling, helping a senior centre with their chair exercise programming, creating or improving park spaces, expanding the national network of rail trails, renovating abandoned and dilapidated structures (brownfields) into viable activity centres, keeping school facilities open to the public, and many other strategies. Everyone needs to ask, ‘how does what we’re doing affect physical activity?’, in order to help get people more active, more often, in more places,” the researchers concluded.
