Features

Inside Out sent Olympic hurdler Colin Jackson to find out.

Fat nation

The UK is the fattest place in Europe - and that's official. At the moment, just 28% of adults do any regular sport or exercise - that's less than half the average in Scandinavian nations.

With the Olympics on its way to London, the Government's target is to get two million of us to pull our socks up and adopt more active lifestyles by 2012.

Counting the cost of no exercise.

There's several key groups of people that the Government is particularly keen to engage in exercise in the run-up to 2012.

Not surprisingly, with childhood obesity figures soaring, children are a major priority.

With distractions from fast food, TV and the Internet, keeping kids fit is a bigger challenge than ever.

Women are also harder to engage in exercise than men, and those looking after kids often particularly struggle to find the time and resources.

And then there's office workers, who spend most of the day sitting on their backsides looking at computer screens.

Fit kids

The Government have said that children aged 5-16 are a crucial focus of their 2012 Health Legacy.

One of the key planks to the Government's exercise strategy is better town planning and infrastructure. It's amazing to think that 25 per cent of trips taken in cars are for journeys of under two miles.

Feeling the pinch - fat Britain.

But if it's made much easier for people to use pedal power rather than drive - then hopefully that's what they'll do.

Joe Bloggs is 12 and goes to school in Leeds. Every day, his parents have to drop him off at his school two miles away.

He'd be happy to cycle there - if it wasn't for the ring roads with their huge roundabouts that make cycling here a nightmare.

The infrastructure for cycling in Leeds leaves a lot to be desired, but developments elsewhere could provide a solution.

Pedal power

Aylesbury is one of six Cycling Demonstration Towns set up around the UK two years ago by Cycling England.

The town has nine main routes that carry cyclists from the outskirts of town to the centre.

They're all colour-coded and named after gemstones, with the signage telling people the time to their destination rather than the distance.

The routes are a mixture of cycle lanes and separate cycle paths, and are designed to have a minimum of stop-starting.

Get on your bike - pedal power.

Over the last couple of years, Aylesbury has boosted its number of cyclists by nearly 40%, and seen a five-fold increase in residents using a bike as one of their two main means of transport.

In January 2008, Ruth Kelly announced £140m over three years for Cycling England. The government has plans for 10 more Cycling Demonstration Towns and one Demo City.

A "Bikeability" scheme aims to get cycling training provision for half million kids by 2012.

All this could encourage local councils throughout the UK to adopt ambitious programmes to promote cycling and sustainable transport.

Ken Livingstone has already announced £500m investment in London over 10 years - based on the Aylesbury model.

Come dancing?

One of the Government's biggest challenges is persuading women to exercise - but less than one in six say that the Olympics will make them more active.

Kirby and Alison live in Skegness in Lincolnshire. They don't exercise as much as they'd like because they lack the time, money is tight and they're busy working mums.

Competitive sport has no appeal to them so the government are trying to encourage women like them to take up dancing.

Fitness is no hurdle for Colin Jackson.

People can dance at almost any age, and it pulls people in who find competitive sport a bit of a turnoff.

In the North East, for example, market research has shown that 41% of women in the region are keen to take up dance exercise, but less than 1% actually make it onto a dance floor!

This kind of exercise can be a lot of fun, and can be a serious health investment too - it brings down blood pressure and improves circulation, helps with weight loss and muscle building, and gets the endorphins pumping.

Walk to work

Another big focus of the Government's exercise strategy is the workplace - where over half of us spend about 60% of our waking lives.

Inside Out visited a call centre in Norwich where nearly all the staff spend all day sitting at their desks answering the phone.

It has been selected as a pilot project by the British Heart Foundation and have introduced several measures to boost their activity levels during the working day.

Getting the staff to walk to work and encouraging them take a stroll at lunchtime are helping workers to get off their backsides.

Fit kit - but how many use it regularly

The call centre also runs pilates sessions before work as well as football and running clubs, on-site health checks, a fruit and veg box delivery service, and discounts to local gyms.

It's one of the ways the Government is aiming to get a third of England walking at least 1,000 more steps daily by 2012.

If successful that amounts to an extra 15 billion steps a day for the country.

Catalyst for change?

The 2012 Olympics has helped put sport and exercise onto the UK agenda in an almost unprecedented way.

We're facing big challenges to improve our infrastructure, motivation and working culture, but the Games is already acting as a catalyst for us to really start tackling some of these in a radical way.

The biggest challenge of all will be to see whether we get off our couches and start to get active...