Three-quarters of Britons exercise at least once a week, yet one in five cannot name any muscles

Skulpt, a health and fitness technology developer, has polled 2,000 Britons to identify the muscle groups people from UK cities choose to focus on, how frequently each region exercises and how they prefer to keep track of their fitness progress.

According to the study, the UK’s top muscle hotspots are:

1. Newcastle
2. Leeds
3. Birmingham
4. Southampton
5. Belfast

The UK’s bottom muscle hotspots are:

1. Aberdeen
2. Oxford
3. Glasgow
4. Portsmouth
5. Sheffield

Some more interesting findings from the study include:

• 77% of Brits exercise at least once a week. Men exercise more than women. A quarter of men exercise the recommended three to four times a week. On the other hand a quarter of the women only exercised once or twice a week.
• Nearly 1 in 5 Brits can’t name any muscles in the body. Around two-thirds could not locate their quadriceps and no clue where their gluteals were located. In fact, one in four did not even know where their biceps were. 10% of those who claim to exercise twice a day believed their pectorals were located in their lower leg rather than in the chest!
• Women scored the least when tested on naming muscles in the body, 21% couldn’t name any at all, whereas 14% of men scored well with their ability to name more than ten muscles in the body.
• Not surprisingly, 37% of women were unhappy with their bodies along with 30% of the men. Around 1 in 3 Londoners admit they’re not happy with their body shape despite 1 in 5 exercising at least once a day.

Other findings include that even those who claimed to be fitness enthusiasts were clueless when it came to tracking their fitness levels, with more than a third admitting that they have never measured or checked their fitness levels.

Juan Jaramillo, VP of Product at Skulpt, comments “Despite widespread disapproval from health professionals, the data reveals that the UK is still a society that relies on tracking health and fitness improvements by jumping on the bathroom scales and measuring their weight.

The results reveal there’s also been a widespread adoption of taking mirror selfies to track fitness progress across the UK, though most can understand that this is not a reliable method to track your progress.

An accurate way to measure your fitness levels is to do the tracking from the inside out by noting down changes in body fat and muscle quality. This will enable Britons to receive a personal in-depth analysis of your body, helping them to identify what areas have been neglected – for instance the lower back – or over-trained – such as the biceps.”

If you are striving to improve your health and fitness, it is important to have a basic understanding of how your body works. This is important both to ensure that the exercise you are doing is beneficial or that it is going to be damaging to your body.

Skulpt Aim is a device that was made after a successful IndieGogo campaign last year. Rather than tracking daily activities, such as steps taken and distance traveled, the device enables users to track their muscle quality and fat percentage across 24 muscles in the body.

The Aim isn’t the first device to measure these metrics. Bioimpedance scales and skinfold calipers have been used by gym goers for years, but the Aim is the first device to measure fat percentage from individual muscles. You can find our full review of the Aim here.