February 2017
Featured in this insight: Sports & physical activity
Survey reveals how much sport English adults partake in: A new survey by Sport England, entitled Active Lives, has released figures into how much, and what kinds, of physical activity English adults (over the age of 16 years old) partake in.
The physical activities which the Active Lives survey incorporates were: walking (for leisure or travel), creative or artistic dance, sporting activities, cycling (for sport and leisure or travel) and fitness activities.
The survey explored how much physical activity the participants took part in over a period of 12 months, which makes the most recent Active Lives survey more thorough than previous years, whereby the participants’ activity was only monitored over a shorter period of four weeks.
According to the survey – whereby the survey results are published on a biannual basis - 25.6 per cent of adults in England are currently inactive, with the participants from the highest socioeconomic groups being more active than those from lower socioeconomic groups.
As well as this, the survey also revealed that the chances of someone being inactive increases with age, with those over the age of 55 being notably more likely to be inactive.
When looking at the difference in activity levels amongst men and women, the researchers discovered that 24 per cent of men are inactive, in comparison with 27 per cent of women.
The most frequent types of physical activities amongst adults in England were found to be walking for leisure and taking part in sports.
Sport England is an organisation within the UK government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
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