Canada's fittest city is in B.C. but it's surprisingly not Vancouver
Despite hosting record-breaking marathons year after year and being a city that values fitness, Vancouver isn’t ranked as Canada’s “most fit” city.
A recent study from MedExpress analyzed eight health metrics across the biggest cities in Canada to create a ranking of what it deems as the fittest cities in the country. Each metric is measured per 100,000 residents.
The researchers turned to Yelp to look at the number of gyms, yoga studios, and Pilates studios to determine the amount of “exercise access.”
It also measured “healthy eating access” by looking at the number of health markets and juice and smoothie bars.
And it determined “fitness engagement” by looking at the total Yelp reviews across those categories, as well as “gym near me” and “healthy restaurants near me” search volume in Google Trends.
With all of this taken into account, they found that the most fit city in Canada is Burnaby.
Burnaby has Canada’s best gym access, with 121.2 gyms per 100,000 people. It also has the best yoga studio access, with 101.2 per 100,000 residents. Further, it ranks the highest for healthy food access, with the most health markets and juice and smoothie bars per 100,000 residents.
But it isn’t the only Metro Vancouver or British Columbian city to make the top of the list.
“British Columbia dominates the top of the list,” said MedExpress.
Four out of five of the top cities are in B.C., with Richmond in second place, Coquitlam in fourth, and Vancouver in fifth.
MedExpress found that while Vancouver has the strongest gym demand (with over 41,000 gym-related searches per 100,000 residents each year), it has a “clear demand-access gap, as it has only 34 gyms per 100,000 residents — this is 87 fewer per 100,000 residents than Burnaby.
Vancouver also ranked the highest for healthy restaurant searches.
Other B.C. cities on the list are Abbotsford (23), Surrey (25), Kelowna (26), Saanich (27), and Langley (29).
Previously, Richmond was crowned the most active place in all of B.C. by Participation, a national organization focused on promoting physical activity.
This award looked at communities’ activity levels and how city staff and community partners motivated people to get active in their community.