At Fitbod, we use mountains of data to produce great workout recommendations, and we constantly mine it for insights. What works best for our users? What’s next for us? Why burpees? Our data scientists spend their days perusing tables, charts, and other mathical things to dig up these answers. But not today.
Sometimes, data scientists just wanna have fun.
We took a data deep dive through the past year’s trends and found some interesting info about our community’s training habits… Like, how much Fitbodders lifted in 2022, which day of the week has the most logged workouts, or which country lifts the most. Most importantly, our team now knows that some of you actually like burpees.
Volume Lifted in 2022
In 2022, Fitbodders lifted 155 billion pounds (70 billion kilograms). That’s 70,000 blue whales, the heaviest animal on Earth. That’s about 211 Empire State buildings or 14,100 SpaceX Starships. It’s an insane amount of weight!
You all got there with a ton of different exercises, but a few moved the most.
Your top exercise was the Leg Press: You logged 8.3 billion pounds (3.8 billion kilograms) logged in 2022. That’s ten of those Empire State buildings. No one’s skipping leg day on our app! And that’s just one of the 900+ exercises in our catalog.
In second place is the Barbell Bench Press at 5.9 billion pounds (2.7 billion kilograms). And rounding out the top three is the Lat Pulldown with 5.4 billion pounds (2.4 billion kilograms).
Together, those alone account for 12% of the total volume Fitbodders lifted in 2022.
Here’s why we think those three are the tops. First: Most people can lift more weight with their legs than their forearms. Second: Leg Presses, Barbell Bench Presses, and Lat Pulldowns are all “high tonnage” and pretty common.
Speaking of Exercise Frequency…
What was the most common exercise in 2022?
The iconic Dumbbell Bicep Curl, winner of all workout montages. Lat year, you did the Dumbbell Bicep Curl in 1.8 million workouts.
Okay, but… “What about the REPS?!”
62 million. For one exercise. Let that sink in.
(Technically, that’s 124 million reps… Since, it’s one rep per arm (just in case you were counting.)
Adding What You Want
As you know, Fitbod builds workouts for you. But, you can also easily add any of our 900+ exercises to your workouts.
In 2022, Fitbodders manually added 26 million exercises. Number one on that list is the Barbell Bench Press, which was added 410,000 times.
At 396,000 adds, Treadmill Walking came in second. This one got us at first. But, the data shows that a lot of you are using it as a warmup.
Leg Extensions, Lat Pulldowns, and Hammer Curls round out the top five.
Those all make sense: The burpees don’t. Some of you add burpees to your workouts, which is impressive but also scary.
A Quick Burpee Digression
If you have been listening to our podcast (check it out here), you know that Fitbodder Jonica Bullock regularly adds them to her workouts. We thought she was unique. We were wrong.
There are five burpee variations on Fitbod:
In total, they were added 47,000 times in 2022.
We even have 823 users who add more than one burpee variation to the same workout. What?!
Finally, there are eight of you who add all five burpee variations. Kudos, killers. Take a bow. Email us so we know you’re all okay… And share your meal plans with us.
Users who love burpees have the right idea. They’re a great exercise! They hit a bunch of muscle groups, get your heart rate up, and improve your body control.
Hate them or love them, burpees work.
The Gym Gender Split
There’s a gender divide at the gym, and it’s split almost right down the middle… at the waist.
No kidding. Men prefer to train their top halves, and women focus on their lower halves.
Men love hitting their arms! They do Chin ups, Preacher Curls, and Dips at 5.04x, 4.93x, and 2.83x the rate of women.
But, guys are only outdoing women in two classic, lower body power lifts: The back squat and deadlift. They win out 1.40x and that’s about it.
Then women take over! Women prefer Dumbbell Sumo Squat, Dumbbell Bulgarian Split Squat, Single Leg Romanian Deadlift, and Jump Squats at 5.30x, 2.55x, 2.22x, and 1.71x the rate of men respectively.
Women hold this preference across the board: They display a higher preference for a staggering 59 of 67 squat and deadlift variations.
The same goes for hip thrusts. Women dominate every variation. They displayed preferences for Barbell Hip Thrust, Dumbbell Hip Thrust, and Dumbbell Glute Bridge at 3.42x, 5.58x, and 3.77x the rate of men.
But, What Do We All Agree On?
Men and women love the gold standards. If we built a workout for both men and women, it would include the Dumbbell Shoulder Press, Dumbbell Fly, Seated Cable Row, Romanian Deadlift, Kettlebell Clean, and Box Jump. And, we’d finish up with an all abs session: Leg Pull-ins, Decline Crunches, and some reps on the Ab Crunch Machine.
Then, everyone goes home happy and equally tired.
Busy Days, Lazy Days
Bet you think Monday is the busiest gym day. Everyone’s in there shedding those weekend calories, right? Nope! It’s Tuesday. Fitbodders logged 15.8 million workouts in 2022, and 2.5 million of them were on Tuesdays.
Other than Tuesdays being awful if there aren’t tacos involved, we don’t know why that is. But, we’re going to find out. Stay tuned.
The rest of the distribution shows no surprises: After the Tuesday peak, it’s all downhill until Sunday.
Going International: Country Rankings
There are Fitbodders all over the world: We’re in 181 countries. In the interest of stoking national rivalries, we thought it would be fun to rank countries based on the average volume per user lifted in 2022. Here are the top 5: Colombia, Taiwan, Austria, Brazil, and Spain.
To our Colombian users: ¡Felicitaciones! That’s some serious volume.
The US—where we have the most users—is in ninth! With an average volume per user of 352,000 pounds (160,000 kilograms), the US needs to step it up by at least 17 percent if it wants to rank in the top five next year.
Alright, that’s enough math for one article. See you all again in 2023. Stay fit!
