Only 8% of American adults say they’ve made a close friend online, while 51% say they have “activity friends” — people they know through sports, hobbies, or community groups — according to a nationally representative survey. That six-to-one gap helps explain why run clubs, rec leagues, and pickup sports have become the thing people who are sick of swiping actually show up for. New clubs on Strava nearly quadrupled in 2025 alone, and the platform’s own data shows group workouts converting into the kind of durable, in-person social ties that dating and friendship apps have struggled for years to replicate.
The numbers behind the shift
The friendship data comes from the Survey Center on American Life, which polled 2,019 U.S. adults and found that shared activities substantially outperform digital platforms for building real friendships. Workplaces still produce the most close friendships overall — 54% of Americans with a close friend met that person through work — but activity-based friendships aren’t far behind, and they don’t require an employer. Online friend-making, by contrast, registered at just 8%, a figure that has stayed stubbornly low even as friendship apps and matching platforms have multiplied.
Fitness culture has clearly noticed. Strava’s 12th Annual Year in Sport Trend Report, based on a survey of more than 30,000 people and activity data from its 180 million-plus global users, found the platform’s clubs nearly quadrupled in 2025 to reach 1 million total, with running clubs growing 3.5 times over and hiking clubs 5.8 times over. Club-organized events — actual meetups, not just app notifications — rose 1.5 times year-over-year. Separately, the Running Industry Association, citing Strava’s own trend reporting, found that run-club participation grew 59% globally over the past two years, making group running the fastest-growing social activity on the platform.
Why sweat beats swiping
Part of the appeal is structural. A run club or rec league gives people a recurring reason to be in the same place at the same time, week after week, without anyone having to initiate a conversation from scratch the way a dating or friendship app requires. Strava’s report found that Gen Z is 39% more likely than Gen X to use fitness specifically as a way to meet people who share their interests, suggesting younger adults are treating group workouts as a friendship strategy rather than just exercise. The same report found 46% of respondents said “heck yes” to a workout-first date, versus 31% who declined — evidence the appeal isn’t confined to platonic connections, either.
It isn’t just running
Running clubs happen to have the best public data because platforms like Strava track them automatically, but the same logic applies to adult kickball leagues, beer-league hockey, climbing gyms, and community volleyball nights — any setup that puts the same group of people in the same room on a schedule. The Survey Center on American Life’s research backs this up directly: its 51% “activity friends” figure covers sports, hobbies, and community service broadly, not running specifically, which suggests the mechanism at work is repetition and shared context rather than anything unique to fitness. What a rec league offers that a friendship app can’t manufacture is a built-in excuse to show up again even on a week when you’d rather not make small talk with someone new.
That matters more given the backdrop. Researchers tracking what’s been called a broader “friendship recession” among American adults have flagged declining close-friend counts across most age groups over the past few decades, which is part of what makes an 8% online-friendship rate look so thin by comparison. Adults aren’t short on ways to meet people in theory — they’re short on structures that turn a first meeting into a fifth hangout, and that is precisely the gap recurring activity groups fill.
None of this means apps are disappearing. But the data points in one consistent direction: repeated, low-stakes, in-person contact around a shared activity produces friendships that stick in a way that a profile and a message thread mostly haven’t. Run clubs and rec leagues don’t promise a match — they just guarantee you’ll see the same faces again next Tuesday, and it turns out that’s most of what real friendship actually requires. The apps optimized for a first message; the group workout optimized for a fifth one, which appears to be where the actual bonding happens.
