Are Londoners the most fitness savvy in Europe?

Are Londoners the most fitness savvy in Europe?

10 July 2019

Living in a city can be stressful and depressing at times, which is why it’s so important to maintain positive wellbeing. Londoners know this, and they also know that regular diet, fitness and exercise are the keys to keeping happy, but is it really Londoners who demonstrate this the best?

Living in a city can be stressful and depressing at times, which is why it’s so important to maintain positive wellbeing. Londoners know this, and they also know that regular diet, fitness and exercise are the keys to keeping happy, but is it really Londoners who demonstrate this the best?

 

Gyms and fitness

 

London offers a plethora of great ways to keep fit, serving up large green spaces for jogging and dog-walking, training boot-camps and even luxury gyms (some with celebrity clientele). For the more serious work-out sessions, Londoners can enrol on brief bootcamp style workout weekends.

 

Prestige Boot Camp is one of these high calibre fitness boot camps with comprehensive, yet affordable fitness activities well-suited for all levels of work-out, from casual to hardcore. Those enrolling on such a bootcamp get put through a series of high intensity and low intensity work-outs.

 

However, a bootcamp is just one of the many fun and effective ways of losing weight available to Londoners. There are also lessons for dancing, ice-skating, roller blading, fencing, watersports and even free-running, to name just a few possibilities.

 

Transport is too good

 

Londoners need to stay fit because of how amazing their transport links are. For the lazy among us, London is the best choice for commuting, so it is all too easy to fall into a slump of routine train and bus journeys.

 

The London Underground, as well as the Overground, covers a vast area of London and keeps people well-connected to their jobs. You can happily live in London without ever having to drive a car.

 

To encourage a greater emphasis on fitness throughout the Greater London area, Santander bikes (nicknamed ‘Boris bikes’ after the then London mayor, Boris Johnson) are dotted around the area so that people can opt to cycle from place to place, instead of relying on public transportation.

 

Cycling promotes positive cardiovascular fitness and even helps to cut down on carbon emissions by eliminating the need for a car, proving that London is both fitness-savvy and eco-friendly.

 

Competition in Europe

 

Londoners are up against some stiff competition when it comes to fitness. Many lists fail to include London at all when discussing the healthiest places in Europe.

 

Monte Carlo in Monaco and Jonkoping in Sweden rank highly as some of the healthiest cities in Europe and even the world. However, Monte Carlo's health is probably largely attributable to top-notch health-care, while Jonkoping has amazing elder healthcare with the Esther Project.

 

The third healthiest city in the world holds the number one spot for healthiest city in Europe: Copenhagen. However, Copenhagen earns this reputation due to its stress free environment. Only 2% of residents work 40 hours a week or more, with the rest having more free time for hobbies and exercise.

 

It's frankly scary to compare Copenhagen residents to Londoners, 33% of which work an average of nine hours a day (45 a week). Exercise and healthy living help to alleviate the stresses of long shifts, but this doesn’t even begin to put London ahead of Copenhagen in terms of healthy living. Even in the UK alone, there are other, more fitness-savvy cities.  

 

Competition in the UK

 

Going even smaller and analysing the cities of the UK alone also brings up some disappointing news for London.

 

A study carried out by Adapt Nutrition shows that Oxford has the most health-conscious population of any city in the UK,  with roughly 74 percent of the city’s residents working out at least once a week.

 

The second and third most fitness-savvy cities are Manchester, with 65 percent of the population working out at least once-weekly, and Liverpool, with a close 63 percent.

 

Another interesting piece of information to come from this study is the proportion of Londoners who know what a macronutrient is. Macronutrients are foods that provide essential calories and energy within a diet, but only 13% of Londoners knew this.

 

This compares to the very different situation in Liverpool, where roughly 25% of people could answer provide the right definition for a macronutrient.  

 

What’s the verdict?

 

Although Oxford has London beat in terms of fitness culture and several different cities in Europe alone can claim to be much healthier than London, that’s not to say that London isn’t fitness-savvy. The high-quality gyms, Santander bikes and large green spaces like Hyde Park help to show that there is an ever-present culture of fitness within London.

Despite the unparalleled public transport that the majority of London takes for granted, positive exercise regimes and healthy living are still strongly encouraged in the country's capital - as, indeed, they should be.