A study published by the American College of Sports and Medicine, ACMS, found that the fittest cities in the US are San Francisco and Seattle. The study was based on the information the ACMS heath specialists got from US census and other governmental data and tried to rank the nation’s 15 most populated cities plus Indianapolis.

The Indiana city, which ranks 33 in statistics referring to the number of people that live in a city, was included in the study because it is the base of the American College for Sports Medicine and the place where all its conferences are held.

The study has taken into consideration multiple factors that influence health, such as the percentage of the population that smokes, the number of overweight people, and the number of parks, bicycle tracks or sidewalks where people can run. Of course, the number of hours that people who live in these cities spend on doing fitness exercise was also taken into account as well as the number of health care providers.

The maximum number of points a city could have scored was 432. San Francisco, the ‘winner’ of the ACMS study got 403 points, while Seattle came second, with 401. Boston came third, followed by Washington, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, Miami, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Huston, Los Angeles and Riverside. Detroit came last, with only 149 points.

Fitness is a very important issue, because it has been proved that working out, jogging and eating a healthy diet drastically reduces the chance of developing heart disease, the number one killer in the US.

ACMS has said that it hopes the cities that have been included in the study will use this information to find out what their weak points are and take measures for improving them.