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The Best Cities in the Country for Your Exercise Goals, Ranked

How are those New Year’s fitness resolutions looking? Are you eight from eight and looking great for 2020? Or have your sweatpants already been consigned to the bottom of the washing basket, never to be seen again?

RELATED: Top Health and Fitness Trends For 2020

Because it turns out a lot of your success at sticking to your fitspo goals may not actually be down to you. Instead, it could be all about where you live. A new study has identified the best and worst cities in the United States in which to maintain an active lifestyle. And the gap between the haves and have-nots is pretty stark.

The Winners

The research comes via personal finance website Wallethub, which compared the 100 biggest cities in the U.S. based on 38 key indicators of an active lifestyle. The data set ranges from average monthly gym fees and bike scores to a city’s share of physically inactive adults. It even looks at who has the most basketball hoops per capita. In short, it’s pretty comprehensive.

Source: WalletHub

So, where to live for daily fitspo? Well, it maybe depends on two key considerations around which the study was based — ‘Sports & Outdoors’ and ‘Budget & Participation’ — but in short, everyone should pack up their belongings and move to Hawaii. Honolulu was rated as the best overall city for an active lifestyle, topping the ‘Sports & Outdoors’ rating and coming in 52nd on a ‘Budget & Participation’ rank.

That meant Honolulu was top of the three cities in the country for exercise facilities such as swimming pools, soccer fields, basketball hoops and tennis courts (it actually has the most tennis courts per capita in the U.S.). And it rated in the middle of the pack in terms of the cost of exercise and participation rates across its population.

Chicago was listed as the second best city in the country to get your sweat on, coming in second in the ‘Sports & Outdoors’ metric and 53rd for ‘Budget & Participation’. From there, you start to see a trend of bigger and wealthier cities dominating the rankings. San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, NYC, Denver, and DC all made the top 10 – even if where they sat on ‘Sports & Outdoors’ and ‘Budget & Participation’ varied a little.

The research weighed facilities as more important than budget and participation concerns, so the cities that rated highly on ‘Sports & Outdoors’ tended to come out on top overall.

San Francisco, for example, had the most fitness centers per capita, while NYC boasted the most playgrounds, making them great cities to live in if you want to be active. As long as you can pay the rent. And the gym fees.

The Biggest Losers

So which locales didn’t rate so highly?

Taking out the last place was North Las Vegas, the city ranking lowest of all for budget and participation, and sixth lowest for facilities. Other cities that didn’t stack up to Wallethub’s research were Irving, Arlington and Laredo in Texas, and Bakersfield and San Bernardino in California.

But what about a city that rated highly in both exercise facilities and participation? The only town to make the top 10 in both metrics AND be in the top 10 overall was Portland, OR (surprise, surprise), but Minneapolis and Denver weren’t too far behind, coming in at eighth and ninth overall, with the former being stronger in terms of exercise facilities and Denver coming in at number three for its participation stats.

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via https://www.DMTBeautySpot.com

Matt Shea, Khareem Sudlow