Leisure-time exercise in China co-patterns with friendship-oriented leisure socializing more strongly than with broader social-capital attitudes or neighborhood contact, though findings are associative and do not establish causation or direct exercise companionship.
Key Findings
Results
Friend gatherings showed the largest social-relational association with leisure-time exercise among the social capital measures examined.
Standardized beta for friend gatherings was 0.149 in the primary social-contrast model
This exceeded coefficients for neighborhood interaction, generalized trust, and perceived fairness
All coefficient-comparison p-values were less than 0.001
Friend gatherings were treated as a proxy for friendship-oriented leisure socializing, not as direct evidence that respondents exercised with friends
Results
The association between friend gatherings and leisure-time exercise remained positive after adjustment for other leisure activities.
After adjustment for other leisure activities, the standardized beta was 0.081
This adjusted association remained statistically significant (p < 0.001)
Robustness analyses supported the same 'bounded interpretation' of the finding
Results
Boundary analyses did not support that the friend gathering–exercise association was reducible to venue or gym-based exercise.
Boundary analyses were conducted to test whether the pattern was driven by venue/gym exercise specifically
Results did not show the pattern was reducible to venue/gym exercise
This suggests the association extends beyond structured gym-based socializing contexts
Results
Supplementary health-profile analyses did not identify an exercise-friendship health synergy.
Health-profile analyses were conducted as supplementary analyses
No exercise-friendship health synergy was identified in these analyses
The authors note this as a boundary condition of their findings
Methods
The study pooled nine waves of the Chinese General Social Survey spanning 2010 to 2023.
Nine anonymous repeated cross-sectional waves of the Chinese General Social Survey were used
Data spanned from 2010 to 2023
Standardized OLS models included socioeconomic and demographic covariates, survey-year fixed effects, and harmonized province fixed effects
The study design was cross-sectional, precluding causal inference
Results
Broad social-capital measures such as generalized trust and perceived fairness were less strongly associated with leisure-time exercise than friend gatherings.
Generalized trust and perceived fairness coefficients were each significantly smaller than the friend gatherings coefficient (p < 0.001 for each comparison)
Neighborhood interaction also showed a weaker association than friend gatherings
The authors conclude that broad social-capital measures 'may obscure the concrete relationships through which leisure-time exercise is organized'
What This Means
This research suggests that among Chinese adults, the frequency with which people gather with friends is more closely linked to whether they exercise in their leisure time than broader social factors like how much they trust strangers, how fair they think society is, or how often they interact with neighbors. The researchers analyzed data from nearly a decade and a half of a large, repeated national survey in China (2010–2023) and found that friend gatherings had the strongest statistical association with leisure-time exercise of all the social factors they measured. Importantly, this association held up even after accounting for other leisure activities people might do.
The study does not prove that socializing with friends causes people to exercise more, nor does it show that people are necessarily exercising together with their friends. Rather, it finds that exercising and gathering with friends tend to co-occur in people's lives — they are part of the same broader pattern of social leisure activity. The researchers also found no evidence that the link was simply explained by people going to gyms or fitness venues together, and they found no additional health benefit from combining exercise and friendship beyond what each provides separately.
This research suggests that public health efforts to promote physical activity in China might benefit from focusing on friendship networks and social leisure contexts, rather than relying solely on neighborhood-level programs or appeals to general civic values. However, since the study is observational and cross-sectional, it cannot tell us whether encouraging friend gatherings would actually lead to more exercise, or whether the relationship runs in the other direction, or is driven by some other shared factor.
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Zhu W, Lin Y, Hong B. (2026). Association between friend gatherings and leisure-time exercise among Chinese adults.. Frontiers in public health. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1909863