Rucking—strapping weight to your body and going for a walk—is the perfect exercise for someone who wants to break a sweat AND dress like 50 Cent.

With influencers frequently touting weighted walking as a way to maintain bone density and muscle mass as you age, Americans are increasingly hopping on the bandwagon and buying gear to help weigh down their hikes, strolls, and daily constitutionals. From May 2024 to May 2025, weighted vest sales increased more than 50% to $27 million, according to Circana data.

Waste of time or worth the weight?

There’s no doubt that carrying extra weight on your walks will make them more difficult, which could improve strength and endurance. But the science is less clear on a claim frequently made online: that rucking can slow down bone-density loss more than regular exercise. Influencers (many of whom also make commissions on vest sales) have promoted it as a major benefit—especially for women, who rapidly lose bone density in the years after menopause—but, according to the New York Times:

• One small study found no difference in the bone health of people who walked with vests and those who didn’t.
• Other small-scale studies have shown that wearing vests during higher-intensity exercise could improve bone health, but it’s hard to say whether those benefits were from the vests or the exercise itself.

A weight-and-see approach: Experts say as long as you don’t have joint pain and aren’t at risk for a spine fracture, weighted walking should be fine. Just be sure to start low and slow—with proper form—to avoid injury, then add weight and distance as you feel more comfortable.—BC

Send this to someone who hates the gym but loves home improvement: Research shows that you can get some of the key benefits of a workout just by putting some extra oomph into your chores.

It’s like doing daily activities on hard mode. Raising your heart rate for just one to two minutes, three to four times per day, can lower your risks of cardiovascular disease and early death, compared to people with sedentary lifestyles, according to recent studies. To accrue those minutes, some researchers recommend working it into your daily routine, whether that means playing with your dog, power walking between household tasks, or taking multiple trips up and down the stairs to purge your closet.

Have a fireplace? Try swinging an axe

Fans of the so-called lumberjack workout swear that there’s no better way to engage all your muscles than by chopping timber. Chris Hemsworth, who typically wields a magical hammer, got in on the trend in recent years, Instagramming a video of himself splitting wood in his backyard that’s now one of his most-liked posts.

Meanwhile, TikTok’s favorite log cutter is a Californian named Thoren “Thor” Bradley, who has amassed more than 10 million followers by splitting enormous pieces of wood and sometimes taking his shirt off. He also sells conventional fitness coaching.

British actress Elizabeth Hurley was early on the trend. She told Extra in 2019 that, at the age of 54, she got her exercise from “gardening…cutting down a hedge, using my chainsaw to cut down a tree, logging.” Proceed with caution, y’all.—ML

It’s time to put your good boots on and lock in: Your aunt’s favorite workout is now the coolest way to spend your Friday nights. In recent years, country line dancing has seen a massive resurgence in major US cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The trend follows the yeehaw aesthetic fad, led by megastars like Beyoncé and Chappell Roan, that permeated pop culture.

Line dancing, a form of group dancing in which participants perform synchronized choreography in rows or lines, isn’t always country-themed (think “Cupid Shuffle” or “Electric Slide”)—but the popular ones are typically Western. It traces its roots to the postwar 1940s square-dancing boom, but also finds inspiration from traditional African and Caribbean movements. Line dancing and partner contra dancing were particularly beloved in LA’s queer clubs in the early ’70s.

But now, mainstream culture has caught on:

• The 1980s film Urban Cowboy, starring John Travolta with a questionable beard, helped popularize the dance form. In 1992, Billy Ray Cyrus released “Achy Breaky Heart”—accompanied by an official line dance for the song—in an effort to capitalize on the growing trend.
• While most of the line dance choreo currently flooding TikTok comes from fans (there’s a lot of Pitbull), Sabrina Carpenter sent it soaring this summer with her “Manchild” video, which has nabbed more than 113 million views.

Big picture: Those viewers have translated into IRL dancers as well, with bars seeing massive spikes in traffic after they undergo country-ification. Hill Country in Manhattan hosts line dancing lessons every Tuesday, and tickets for the events have been known to sell out within 15 minutes.—MM

It’s not exactly the Sharks and the Jets, but there’s a turf war playing out between two rival factions. Pickleballers are taking over the territory of tennis players, with thousands of pickleball courts being built on top of existing tennis courts.

In 2025, pickleball was the fastest growing sport in the US for a fourth consecutive year. As of 2023, 48 million American adults played Tennis But Without All The Pesky Moving Around annually, according to the Association of Pickleball Professionals. The sport’s rising popularity in the US has spurred the construction of new pickleball courts, often at the expense of tennis courts:

• An analysis by the New York Times found that more than 26,000 pickleball courts were built between 2019 and 2025, with most occupying spaces that had previously been used exclusively for tennis.
• During that seven-year stretch, the NYT found that more than 8,000 tennis courts were transformed into pickleball courts—because of their size, it’s possible to put four pickleball courts in the space one tennis court used to occupy.
• There may be more to come. There were new pushes in many municipalities last year to replace tennis courts with pickleball courts, including Los Angeles and New York.

Why the tennis takeover? It’s a cheaper way to build. According to the YMCA of the Sunbelt in Georgia, converting four tennis courts into 12 pickleball courts cost $150,000; building that many pickleball courts from scratch would have cost $1 million.

But it’s not a game, set, match victory over tennis: The NYT said that last year marked the first time there was a decline in pickleball courts being built atop tennis courts, while new standalone pickleball courts remain on the rise.

One paddle after another: Taking over tennis spaces remains controversial. In one gated community in West Palm Beach, the warring racquet factions formed LLCs to take the other side to court (the legal kind).—DL

Everyone knows that the friend who can’t stop talking about their rock climbing gym also secretly dreams of summiting Mount Everest. That’s never been more possible than today, since extreme Himalayan climbing is now accessible to tourists beyond survivalists with bushy beards.

Peak business

In the years after the swashbuckling New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his intrepid Nepalese local guide Tenzing Norgay became the first known people to summit Everest in 1953, the number of annual Everest ascents stayed in the single digits for the next two decades.

But thanks to equipment innovations that made climbing more manageable, the number of summiters skyrocketed in the 1990s and continued to grow from 121 in 1998 to 866 in 2025—with an entire industry emerging to bring amateur alpinists to the summit. Several Nepalese companies offer fully planned expeditions, complete with glamping at slopeside camps, climbing tech, and know-how from local mountain guides known as Sherpas.

While a sense of direction is no longer a prerequisite to ascend Everest, deep pockets are:

• The average price of an expedition tour to the Everest summit is around $61,000, according to ExpedReview.
• That includes the cost of a permit issued by the Nepalese government, which was recently raised from $11,000 to $15,000 for the most popular climbing season.

For those cool with not earning an “I climbed the world’s tallest mountain” shirt, there are several alternative mountains offering a shorter timeline and less risk.

Nepal wins…by letting foreigners chase altitude euphoria, as its mountaineering-dominated tourism industry accounts for up to 10% of its relatively modest GDP.

But…the Everest summit looking like a Sears on Black Friday has increased risk to climbers. At least 31 people have died ascending the mountain since 2023. It’s also fueled conservationists’ concerns about damage to the Himalayan environment. And some critics claim the commodification of extreme climbing has sucked the sense of self-reliant adventure from conquering a 29,000-foot peak.—SK