image: Proportion of people 18 years and older who report muscle-strengthening exercise two or more times per week by country: a Muscle-strengthening exercise defined as physical activities specifically designed to strengthen muscles, such as doing resistance training or strength exercises (using weights, elastic band, own body weight, etc.) or push-ups (press-ups)/knee bends (squats). b This figure was generated using the open-source statistical software R (version 4.0.2; R Core Team [2020]. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.), and the following mapping packages available via the CRAN network: "rnaturalearth" and "rnaturalearthdata" . rnaturalearth: World Map Data from Natural Earth. R package version 0.1.0. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rnaturalearth. These packages facilitate interaction with Natural Earth map data (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/) and are public domain dataset commonly used in world mapping, and as such does not contravene any copyright law. view more
Credit: Bennie et al (2020) PLOS ONE, CC BY
A 28-country comparison of 280,605 adults reveals that just 17% of adult Europeans perform specific muscle-strengthening exercises--e.g.: squats, situps, and pushups--twice or more a week, as recommended by the WHO.
###
Article Title: The epidemiology of muscle-strengthening exercise in Europe: A 28-country comparison including 280,605 adults
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242220
Journal
PLoS ONE