Stop driving to the gym

In the UK, exercise has become a commodity: sign up to gym membership, finance that shiny new car to take you there three times a week, and don't forget some selfie-ready kit to run indoors on the treadmill. Fancy cycling with the family at the weekend? Load the bikes onto the expensive roof rack and head to one of those old railway paths, or to a mountain bike trail in the forest.

Now I like a ride in the forest as much – or possibly more – than the next person. But we seem to have lost our minds. How can physical activity be something you need to drive to? When did we forget about the journey? After all, we just need to walk out of the front door to get some exercise. And we should do exactly this, because it’s the small movements of everyday life, researchers have found, that are part of the secret to longevity in the world’s so-called Blue Zones.

Do the nonagenarians of Ikaria in Greece spend their days criss-crossing the island in their cars – dashing between spin classes? No, they just keep moving their bodies. They walk to the shops or to socialise, and they weed their gardens. In fact, researchers found that people aged 90 years and older in this part of Greece spend as little as 60 minutes per day sitting down. And in Sardinia, they observed centenarians walking over 12,000 steps per day.

Although they may be retired now, these older people are likely to have led active working lives too – employed in traditional industries such as shepherding or labour-intensive agriculture. If you work behind a desk as I do, or at the controls of a machine, then you move less during the working day. And that makes it even more important to be active the rest of the time.

Yet despite the benefits of exercise, encouraging people to live and travel actively – to get out of their cars and walk, wheel or cycle short journeys – is a tough sell. In part, that's because there is nothing to sell. Although increasing our levels of activity could save the National Health Service billions by reducing the risk of getting a whole load of different conditions, private companies don’t stand to gain from it. And so they have no interest in promoting it.

Even my local leisure centre, run by a not-for-profit company on behalf of the council, is abysmal. The broken bike rack outside its front door signals clearly that the management doesn’t care how people get there as long as they buy membership – and preferably also some of the junk food sold in reception. I was once berated by the staff for bringing in our own food, when G was a toddler and there was nothing nutritious on offer to give him.

"You wouldn’t do that in Costa," said the receptionist.
"This isn’t Costa," I replied. "It’s a leisure centre."
"It's the same thing," she shot back.

And there is the problem. A leisure centre is like a chain coffee shop: it exists to sell you something. And it doesn't care too much what that something is, or whether it's really healthy.

Maybe expecting businesses to do anything that doesn’t earn them money directly is asking too much. But neither our civil society nor our built environment do much to encourage active travel. New housing estates are often car-dependent, making exercising from the door difficult or even downright dangerous. Who wants to push their wheelchair or child’s buggy past cars parked all over the pavement? Who wants to run down a road on a dark winter's evening when there's no footpath?

Safety is a particular concern for women. After all, we live in a society where a serving police officer kidnapped, raped and murdered a woman who was walking down a London street. It doesn’t exactly make women want to rush out onto lonely and poorly lit cycle paths. Many feel a whole lot safer driving to the gym for their exercise.

What can we do? We can fight for the things that would enable everyone to live and travel actively: affordable housing close to workplaces and schools, a work-life balance that leaves time for exercise, and a network of walking, cycling and wheeling infrastructure that’s safe for everyone to use.