More and more women in Cheshire West are taking part in sport and getting more active.
Running, exercise classes and hitting the gym are proving the most popular for getting people across the borough off the sofa.
The ‘encouraging’ stats show obesity levels are also falling.
Sport England have released the latest figures from their Active People Survey for 2014/15.
Nationally there has been a similar trend and campaigns such as ‘This Girl Can’ initiative appear to be having a positive impact.
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Their aim had been to banish the stigmas attached to exercise which had created barriers to women being active and healthy.
Sport England chief executive Jennie Price said: “These figures are encouraging, especially the significant increase in the number of women playing sport and being active every week.
“Sport England has worked particularly hard to get more women active, and it’s good to see this is having an impact.”
The Cheshire Girls Can campaign, run by Active Cheshire, has picked up national awards for its impact in getting more mums from deprived backgrounds into physical activity.
There was also a slight increase in the number of men getting involved in regular sport.
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Almost 65% of us are now taking part in enough ‘moderate to vigorous physical activity’ to be considered ‘active’, up by more than 7% on the previous year.
It is paying off around the waist too as the percentage of the population measuring as obese fell sharply to under 10%.
For the first time since Sport England started taking the result, more than half of the Cheshire West population has a Body Mass Index within the ‘healthy weight’ range.
The ‘running boom’ continued with 138,100 more people in the UK running regularly in the last 12 months compared to 2013/14.
The growing success and popularity of Chester Marathon and Half Marathon show that boom is very much alive here in the borough.
