How active is your state? The CDC's numbers, all fifty

Coaching is online, so it works from any state, and the first thing worth knowing about a state is how it trains. Not to judge it. To know what a normal week there looks like before asking anyone to change theirs.

The CDC runs a phone survey every year in every state, and two of its questions are the ones I care about. Did you do any physical activity or exercise outside your job in the past month? And do you do activities to strengthen your muscles, like lifting weights, on two or more days a week? The table below is every state's most recent answer to both.¹

The table

Lower is "better" in the first column (fewer adults doing nothing); higher is "better" in the second (more adults lifting). The year is the most recent one the CDC publishes for that state; a few states have an older year because the newer one was not released for them. Each figure is a survey estimate with a confidence interval of a point or two either way, so neighbors a point apart are not meaningfully different.

Download this table (CSV). Free to reuse with a link back to this page.

States with a link have their own page here, with the rest of the numbers behind a training week there.

Related tables: similar questions for 48 big metros (a different CDC survey product, so don't compare the two directly), summer heat and winter cold by metro, and commute times by state. For cities, how active is your city prints the CDC's PLACES estimates (model-based, so not comparable with this table either); for 40 metros, see rain and commute times by metro.

What stands out

• The spread is wide. The share of adults reporting no activity at all is about twice as high in the states at the bottom of the table as at the top (District of Columbia, Colorado and Utah lowest; Arkansas, West Virginia and Mississippi highest).
• Nowhere does a majority lift. The highest share of adults doing muscle-strengthening work two or more days a week is District of Columbia at 49.1%; the lowest is Kentucky at 27.0%. The median state is near 41.1%. The World Health Organization's guideline for adults is two or more days a week,² so in every state most adults are under it.
• Active and lifting are different things. Several states sit well on the first column and poorly on the second: people who walk, run and hike but have never had a strength program. North Carolina is one example: 19.7% report no activity, yet 34.1% lift twice a week.
• The years differ. Muscle-strengthening is from 2023 for most states and older for Kentucky (2019), Pennsylvania (2019). No-activity is from 2025 for most states and from 2024 for California (2024), Mississippi (2024), Nevada (2024). The table prints the year rather than pretending the data are all from the same one.

How to read your own state

As a backdrop, not a verdict. The survey counts what people say about themselves, it changes a point or two with each year's sample, and it says nothing about you. What it does tell you is what the people around you are doing, which matters more than it should: a plan written for a state where almost nobody lifts needs to survive gyms that are quiet, friends who don't train and a culture that treats strength work as optional. A plan written for a state where a lot of people lift needs to survive comparison and the temptation to do too much.

Either way the plan is the same shape: two or three sessions a week built around the big movements, a floor for the bad weeks, a step count you can hit on a normal day, and someone who reads your numbers. How often to train covers the first part; how to start lifting weights covers the first month if you've never lifted.

Where the numbers come from

Both columns come from one CDC dataset, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System rows published by the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity. The no-activity figure is the question "no leisure-time physical activity" (Q047) and the strength figure is "muscle-strengthening activities on 2 or more days a week" (Q046), overall adults, the most recent year published per state. I pulled them on October 19, 2026, with the CDC's own open-data interface, one state at a time, and each state page on this site prints the same figure with its confidence interval and the survey sample.¹ If you reuse the table, cite the CDC, not me; a link back here is appreciated but the data are theirs.

Whatever your state's row says, it is not a reason to wait. If you want help turning it into a week you can keep, apply and tell me where you are.