ACSM American Fitness Index

Where people live, how walkable their communities are, and whether movement is built into daily life can have just as much as an impact on population health.

That's why the ACSM American Fitness Index measures ranking the 100 largest US cities across health and infrastructure indicators.

In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Stella Volpe to break down the 2026 findings, what the highest performing cities are doing differently, and what the fitness industry can learn from the communities making physical activity more accessible.

This is ATFW.

I speak to a lot of people in the fitness business, so they're gonna be familiar with ACSM, but tell me about the American Fitness In- Index, and what does it actually measure for those not familiar?

Yeah, so the, the ACSM American Fitness Index, we started it, I hope I get this right, 17-plus years ago, and I've actually been on this board for that long, so really excited about that, Chrissy.

And we started it and still continue it because we want to evaluate major cities within the United States, and we, we pick the top 100 by census.

So sometimes cities fall off because their census goes down, because unfortunately, we cannot examine all the state cities in the country.