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Health

15th Jul 2017

Where does Ireland rank among the laziest countries in the world?

Are we a nation of lazy lumps?

Darragh Berry

We’re not the most active… but we’re not the laziest either.

You can’t beat sitting down on your phone for hours on end doing sweet f*ck all. After all, what would you rather do after spending a full day at work.

Well, scientists at Stanford University analysed over 68 million days of physical activity based on smartphone measurements from nearly 720,000 people across 46 countries.

The study was published in Journal Nature, and all the people involved in the study had their activity monitored on a fitness app and how many steps they took a day were counted.

They found that Hong Kong was the most active country in the world with a score of 22.2 on the activity inequality scale with an average step count of nearly 7,000 a day.

The activity inequality that they were measuring is the difference between the fittest people in a country and the laziest people in that particular country.

Ireland isn’t the laziest, but we’re not quite the most active either and we came in at 34 on the list with an activity inequality of 28.5.

China placed second on the list (24.5), followed by Sweden (24.6), South Korea (24.7), and the Czech Republic (24.8).

Ireland did come ahead of their neighbours across the water. The UK ranked two places higher than us in 36th place with a score of 28.8.

Two sets of neighbouring countries, United States and Canada and New Zealand and Australia both broke the 30 markers but Saudi Arabia was deemed the least active with a score of 32.5.