Data reveals two thirds of Aussie adults doing little or no exercise

Two thirds of Australian adults are doing little or no physical activity each day, data released on Tuesday revealed.

The data, compiled by Victoria University's Australia Health Policy Collaboration (AHPC), found that there were just areas in Victoria where there were more people exercising every day than those who didn't.

The areas where a majority of people are exercising, which cover the suburbs of Toorak, Armadale, Elwood, East Melbourne and South Yarra, are all affluent inner-city regions with easy access to open spaces and running tracks.

Everywhere else in the state, a majority of adults were failing to complete the base level of at least three hours of walking for fitness each week.

A cluster of suburbs in Melbourne's outer-north were the least active in Victoria with between 76 and 77 percent of adult residents reporting either zero or a very low amount of exercise.

Australia's Health Tracker, developed by the AHPC, mapped the proportion of people who exercise in every Melbourne suburb using data from multiple sources such as the National Health Survey (NHS).

The tracker also found that one quarter of children aged between two and 17 years old were overweight or obese.

Double Bay in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, which has a median house price of 2.4 million U.S. dollars, was Australia's fittest area with 44 percent of residents active the week before they responded to the NHS.

Rosemary Calder, a director of the AHPC and public health expert, said the place people live was clearly a big factor in physical health.

"We have an attitude of 'people should choose to walk, it's their problem,' and it's not, it's the environment you're in that enables or disables, that encourages or discourages you," Calder told Fairfax Media on Tuesday.

"We have to start looking at ways in which we can make all environments conducive to healthy activity if we want our population to be healthy." Endit