In a study of U.S. adults, walking was, by far, the most popular leisure-time physical activity, while rural residents also enjoyed gardening, hunting and fishing, and urban residents more commonly reported running, weightlifting and dance. Urban residents were more likely than rural residents to meet physical activity guidelines. Christiaan Abildso of West Virginia University, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on April 1, 2026.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services publishes guidelines on recommended amounts of aerobic and muscle-strengthening physical activity for adults. While the overall proportion of U.S. adults meeting these guidelines has increased in recent decades, certain populations are less likely to meet them, including adults living in rural areas. Understanding differences in preferred recreational physical activities could help inform efforts to reduce such disparities.
However, few studies have examined urban versus rural preferences for leisure-time physical activities, and how they relate to meeting guidelines. To address that gap, Abildso and colleagues analyzed telephone survey data collected from a national sample of 396,261 U.S. adults in 2019.
Out of 75 survey options for leisure-time physical activities, walking was the most popular among both urban and rural adults, with 44.1 percent reporting walking as the activity they spent the most time doing. This finding echoes a similar study of U.S. data collected in 2011, which also found walking to be the top activity. However, further analysis of the 2019 data showed that even among walkers, only 1 in 4 (25 percent) met combined guidelines for aerobic and muscle-strengthening physical activity, and about 22 percent did not meet either guideline.
The popularity of other activities varied. For instance, rural residents reported higher rates of gardening, hunting, fishing, and farm work, while urban residents had higher participation in running, weightlifting, bicycling, and dance. However, in general, rural adults were more likely to be inactive and less likely to meet guidelines for aerobic or muscle-strengthening physical activity.
These findings could help inform efforts to boost physical activity by tailoring solutions to be more culturally and demographically appropriate. The researchers also call for a similar analysis of more recently collected data, as habits may have shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christiaan Abildso adds: "We expected to see that walking would continue to be the most common physical activity. However, it was surprising to see that nearly 1 in 4 adults who walk as their main activity did not meet either of the physical activity guidelines. That is, they reported less than the recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity and less than the recommended 2 days per week of muscle strengthening activity, such as yoga or exercises with resistance bands."
"What we might be seeing in these rural-urban differences in preferences may just reflect what people have access to or what is culturally supported. In our work, we see a need to continue to support our partners in small towns and rural places by creating physical, social, and cultural conditions that support physical activity. This could mean creating a wide shoulder on a country road for running and cycling, helping a senior center with their chair exercise programming, creating or improving park spaces, expanding the national network of rail-trails, renovating abandoned and dilapidated structures (Brownfields) into viable activity centers, keeping school facilities open to the public, and many other strategies. Everyone needs to ask, 'how does what we're doing affect physical activity,' in order to help get people more active, more often, in more places."
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4lPV0N8
Citation: Abildso CG, Fitzhugh EC, Beck AM, Johnson A, Maruca DL, Meyer SM, et al. (2026) Adults' leisure-time physical activity preferences and association with physical activity guidelines by metropolitan status, United States, 2019. PLoS One 21(4): e0345026. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0345026
Author countries: U.S.
Funding: This project was supported by cooperative agreement number U48DP006381 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity (DNPAO). The work presented is the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official position of CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services or the federal Government.
