The Great American Fitness Boom
Pilates is surging. Gyms are packed. Americans are working out more than ever. A graph-by-graph guide to the fitness revolution sweeping the country
Americans are in the middle of a historic health wave, even if the national news cycle has mostly ignored it.
The most common causes of premature death—including murder, overdoses, car crashes, and obesity—are all declining. Homicides have plummeted since the pandemic, and the nation’s murder rate may set “a record low in 2025.” The CDC reported an "unprecedented" annual decline in drug overdose deaths this year. Traffic deaths have declined for 12 straight quarters, and the latest fatality rate is “the lowest in six years.” Obesity decreased in the most recent analysis “for the first time in more than a decade,” as GLP-1 drugs continue to improve. As I’ve written, this might be the first time in history that overdose deaths, traffic fatalities, murders, and obesity all decreased in the same batch of government data.
Staying alive is partly about avoiding one’s sudden and unexpected demise. But it's also about the smaller daily and weekly choices that we make to ward off chronic diseases that can kill us slowly. Exercise, for example, may be the single most broadly beneficial health intervention in the world. No other medication or behavioral remedy is so effective at simultaneously combating body-wide inflammation, visceral fat accumulation, and neurodegenerative diseases. So, one would hope that a true health wave in America would also see a big leap in fitness activities.
In fact, that's exactly what seems to be happening.
While I haven’t seen much reporting on it in mainstream news outlets, Americans are working out and playing sports more than any period for which we have good data. The surge in fitness is being led by some surprising groups, including older women. As sweaty group-exercise classes decline, low-impact activities, such as yoga and Pilates, are surging in popularity to replace them. I have so much more to say about this trend than can fit into a single post—including how I think this story fits into the phenomenon I call the antisocial century—but today we’re going to focus on the most fundamental questions about the great American exercise boom.
1. What’s the one graph that proves the exercise boom is real?
Every year since 2003, the American Time Use Survey has asked thousands of people how often they participate in certain activities on an average day, such as working, gardening, or going to parties. One category they ask about is “sports, exercise, and recreation.”
In the last two decades, the share of American adults who say they exercise or play sports on any given day has increased by about 20 percent. Year-to-year ATUS data can jitter up and down, but what’s clear is that in the last four years, Americans have been exercising at record-high levels.
2. That’s just one study. Got another source?
Sure. In the last few years, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association has conducted tens of thousands of online surveys about Americans’ participation in various sports, fitness, and leisure activities. I was very grateful when SFIA agreed last week to share its latest report with me, because it’s chockablock with fascinating stuff.
In the biggest picture, SFIA and ATUS are in full agreement: Americans are exercising and playing sports at record high levels. The share of Americans who say they don’t regularly work out or play sports, which SFIA calls the “inactivity rate,” has fallen by more than one-fifth since 2019.
3. Who works out the most?
Rich and young Americans exercise the most. Poor and older Americans work out the least. Among adults, income predicts activity better than age. That is, seniors are about 50 percent more likely to be inactive than 18- to 24-year-olds, but the lowest income level (under $25,000) has an inactivity rate “roughly three times higher than the highest income level ($100,000),” according to SFIA. While affluent Americans exercise more, these graphs show that the rise of fitness—or the decline in inactivity—is happening across every age and every income level.
4. What gender or age group is leading the workout wave?
The short answer is: Young people and older women.
Here’s the slightly longer answer. Every age and gender group saw rising participation in “exercise, sports, or recreation” between 2003 and 2024, according to the American Time Use Survey. By this measure, the increase is uniform across ages and genders. But if you dive deeper into the data, you’ll see that the increase in exercise minutes is significantly led by young people and women over 65, who increased their weekly workouts by about twice as much as men over 65.
Actually, take a closer look at the above graph. Exercise time for young and older Americans clearly increased in the last two decades. But it didn’t increase for Americans between 25 and 64, even though their overall participation in exercise and fitness grew by about 20 percent. This raises a thorny question…
5. So, prime-age Americans today are 20 percent more likely to say they exercise than in 2003, but their overall exercise time hasn’t increased? Huh!?
Yep. Kinda weird. This is where the story of the US exercise boom demands a bit of nuance and a brief dip into methodology.
The ATUS doesn’t just ask people to say if they participate in an activity. The survey also calculates how long they spend doing that activity on an average day. Today’s 25- to 64-year-olds are more likely to say they participate in exercise. But daily exercise minutes haven’t really budged for this prime-age group.
One simple explanation would be: More Americans are working out, but the average workout time has gone down in the last 20 years. Perfectly valid solution.
But I have a slightly more complicated and interesting interpretation. I think Americans are working out more alone and from home, and the rise of solo homebound exercise is reducing the total amount of time that ATUS surveyors attribute to fitness. Imagine somebody who, in 2005, once took 90-minute round trips to the gym. He’d get in the car; drive 15 minutes; park; go into the gym; drop off his gym bag in a locker; work out; shower; change his clothes; get back into his car; and drive home. Today, that same guy can walk downstairs to his basement, complete a 45-minute at-home workout, and be done with it. It’s plausible that some minutes that used to be attributed to getting in and out of the gym have been eliminated by the rise of at-home workouts, and this is artificially deflating the rise in total exercise minutes. This hypothesis isn’t being conjured out of thin air, by the way. The sociologist Patrick Sharkey has found that Americans are more likely to exercise at home than in the early 2000s. (In fact, Sharkey said, we’re likely to do everything at home, including work, eat, watch movies, and pray.)
5. Is there any evidence that this fitness boom is international?
Briefly, yes. Look at the UK. According to a 2025 survey by Sport England, the increase in physical activity across the pond is similarly being led by the surge in exercise among people over 55 years old and especially over 75 years old. English people 75 years and older are about 30 percent more likely to be active for more than 150 minutes a week than just a decade ago.
6. What fitness trends are rising and falling?
No fitness activity saw a larger increase in participation between 2019 and 2024 than Pilates. Yoga and barre were close behind among the fastest-growing activities. Meanwhile, group cycling, cardio kickboxing, boot camps, and cross-training workouts like CrossFit got walloped by the pandemic, and they haven’t bounced back. In general, Americans seem to have traded sweaty group classes for gentler core work.
The following graph based on the same SFIA dataset shows absolute numbers rather than percent change. Sorry in advance for the small font. Here are some takeaways:
Classic gym activities—treadmills, free weights—are still the most common forms of exercise, followed by jogging.
No single fitness activity has grown more in absolute numbers than yoga in the last five years.
It looks like once-popular cross-training-style workouts (e.g., CrossFit) and boot camps (e.g., Barry’s Boot Camp) have been somewhat replaced by a significant increase in people who just use free weights and kettlebells on their own.
7. Is it safe to say a lot of people who did SoulCycle in the 2010s have switched to Pilates in the 2020s?
I think so. I wanted to produce a specific graph showing the handoff from two different eras of fitness fashion: The decline of “group cycling” classes like SoulCycle and the rise of Pilates, whose percent increase since 2019 exceeds that of other kind of fitness. Here it is.
8. Why is the great American fitness boom happening?
What is easy. Why is hard. Here are four theories.
This is part of a wellness wave that surged after the pandemic. The most significant increase in exercise happened in the three years after 2020, when a health crisis made people more aware of their mortality in ways both healthy and neurotic. It’s not just exercise participation that’s increased in the last few years. It’s Oura rings, and biometric obsessions, and Bryan Johnson, and the immense popularity of health and wellness podcasts, such as Huberman Lab. Even before getting to RFK Jr. and MAHA, wellness is clearly having a post-pandemic moment.
… but it’s also about fitness being a long-term fixation of modern affluence. Go back and look at the first chart in this story. The rise of exercise participation didn’t start in 2021. It has been happening ever since ATUS started surveying Americans in 2003. My bet is that if this survey went back to the 1980s, you would see a long-term increase in exercise and fitness, represented in pop culture in everything from Jane Fonda home videos to Jazzercise and Buns of Steel workouts in the 1990s.
This is partly about older people being healthier than they used to be. The most recent increase in exercise is being led by older women and gentler group workouts, such as yoga. I would strongly bet that better diets and advanced cardio-metabolic medicine have made older affluent Americans, especially women, healthier than they were in the past, and the increase in older-female exercise rates is both a reflection of and a driver of that increase in old-age health.
This is partly about young people health-maxing in an age of declining social connection. Several weeks ago, I had a fascinating conversation with Emily Sundberg about how young people today consider an early-morning workout more high status than a late-night party. Indeed, I think being a young person today involves less social fitness and more physical fitness. Compared to previous generations, Gen Z has fewer parties, and more jogs; less hanging out, and more yoga; less hooking up, and less alcohol. They’re health-maxing in a way historically unique, at the same time that their withdrawal from physical social connection is similarly without precedent. As I’ve said many times, I think exercise is pretty much the greatest behavioral intervention ever, and I’m never going to suggest that the rise of fitness culture is a bad thing. But when I look at a graph like this, I cannot help but think that young people today need to think about the costs of both chronic disease and chronic solitude.
That’s all for now. Tomorrow I’ll publish a brief follow-up to this post. It about another sports trend that readers will either find highly entertaining or highly annoying depending on how they feel about … this sound.
As a 20-something gym-goer (who might not look like it lol!) I just wanted to add a comment…and maybe something for you to look into…on your 4th point, “This is partly about young people health-maxing in an age of declining social connection.” From what I have seen in my own life, my friend’s, and community, the fitness boom is indeed a direct response to declining social connection. But that’s because gyms and workout classes are where many people go specifically to seek out a social life, to talk to people, to attend events, to be a member of a community. Gyms are becoming social hubs. Your Tuesday 7:30am pilates class regulars have a group chat and you check in on each other week to week. In a time when you can’t meet people at a bar, or at church, or seemingly anywhere else, it seems to me that gyms have been filling that void for social connection, to get out of the house and around people…
There are many psychological benefits to exercise. One of them is a sense of control. There are many things in life that people are unable to control, or at least unable to substantially control. Provided that a person is generally healthy and unaffected by significant physical limitations, fitness can be maintained simply by the consistent application of effort. The payback from the investment of time is almost guaranteed and it provides an ongoing sense of achievement and self-worth over and above the physical well being. Although I have not seen data, I would be surprised if people did not feel a general reduction in control of their lives over the last 15 years, for obvious reasons. This sense of lost control may also explain an increase in exercise activity. My personal experience is that nothing calms anxiety like a good workout, and we all know how much anxiety is on the rise.