Do You Live in the Part of the Country Where People Run the Most? – runnersworld.com

• A new study, published in the journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, used Twitter to break down the different types of activities people all over the U.S. regularly perform.
• Running was one of the most popular activities people tweeted about, and was most commonly posted by people in the Midwest.
• The results can be beneficial for doctors and fitness professionals when discussing exercise for health with patients and clients.

If you regularly post about your workouts on social media, you’re not alone—it can be a fun way to track your progress and hold yourself accountable.

So it’s probably not surprising that just as you are sweating through your steamy tempo run, thousands of people are doing likewise—and posting about it afterward—in places across the country. But ever wonder how your workouts stack up with what the rest of the people across the country are doing?

Researchers set to answer that question. In a new study, published in the journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, used Twitter to break down the types of activities people from different regions of the country enjoy the most and least.

To figure this out, researchers crunched the data from 1,382,284 tweets by 481,146 Twitter users from 2,900 U.S. counties between April 2015 and March 2016. They used keywords that included things like team sports, gym exercises, and outdoor recreational activities.

Their findings? While walking was the most popular activity for men and women across the country, the top exercise terms were “walk,” “dance,” “golf,” “workout,” “run,” “pool,” “hike,” “yoga,” “swim,” and “bowl.”

Men in general tended to participate in higher-intensity workouts than women, which “agrees with previous studies suggesting that women are less likely to meet recommendations for aerobic physical activity,” according to the study. (The intensity of the workouts were calculated as calories burned during 30 minutes of an activity by a 155-pound person—or the average weight of an American adult—the study states.)

Men and women of all areas of the country tweeted about “gym-based activities” at similar rates—both around 4 percent.

When it came to calories, men burned an average of 201 calories per 30 minutes of exercise while women burned an average of 191. Again, researchers calculated the number of calories burned based on a 155-pounds person doing 30 minutes of a certain activity.

Broken down by region, women in the West tweeted most about doing the types of workouts that burn the most calories on average, followed by the Northeast, then the Midwest, then the South. For men, those in the Midwest tweeted most about doing the types of workouts that burn the most calories on average, followed by the South, then the West, then the Northeast.

Watch: These were the most impressive stats from Strava’s 2018 year-end report.

How about running in particular? People in the Midwest were into pounding the pavement the most, with 13 percent of men and 10 percent of women tweeting about it. In the Northeast, 10 percent of men and 9 percent of women mentioned running in their tweets; In the South, about 12 percent of men and 8 percent of women mentioned running in their tweets; and in the West, about 7 percent of men and 6 percent of women mentioned running in their tweets.

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“Tweets provide information on activities and behaviors, and the fact that many tweets are geotagged allows us to view—at geographically fine-grained units of analysis—what people are doing and thinking,” study coauthor Nina Cesare, Ph.D., postdoctoral associate at Boston University’s Center for Global Health & Development, told Runner’s World.

These results, she said, can be useful for public health officials to monitor and identify changes in physical activity on smaller scales, since “using traditional survey methods can delay insight by months or years.”

Additionally, the results can be beneficial for doctors and fitness professionals when discussing exercise for health with patients and clients.

Associate Health & Fitness Editor Danielle specializes in interpreting and reporting the latest health research and also writes and edits in-depth service pieces about fitness, training, and nutrition.