How to find training partners when you have just moved to a new city

Every year around 5,9 million people move into a new home in France, and 1,7 million of them change department. Many leave behind a running group, a tennis partner or a team. Here is what research actually establishes about that moment, and what you can do with it.

How many people move house each year in France?

In September 2025 the national statistics institute published the 2023 figures: 5,9 million people moved into a new main residence, that is 8,8 % of the population. Among them, 1,7 million changed department and 983 000 changed region.

Residential mobility has actually been falling for ten years, when it reached 10,8 %. In other words you are neither an exception nor a majority: roughly one person in eleven went through this in the past year.

Does moving really make people stop exercising?

That is the most widespread intuition, and the data do not support it. A scoping review published in PLOS ONE in 2020, covering 107 studies across 72 life events, concludes that moving house in general is not associated with any measurable change in physical activity levels.

The limit has to be stated honestly: only two or three studies look specifically at that transition, and no French data cross residential mobility with sports participation. So nobody can claim that moving makes you stop, nor the opposite. What can be said is that nothing proves it is inevitable.

How long does it take to make friends?

An American study from 2019 is quoted everywhere to put a precise number of hours on this. It is worth knowing what it actually says. It has two parts with very different results: to move from casual friend to friend, the first estimates 219 hours, the second 119 hours. A twofold gap, on two unrelated populations.

Its author himself notes that his retrospective estimates are imprecise and inflated by construction. So read those numbers as exploratory orders of magnitude, not as a counter. The useful message is not a figure, it is that adult friendship is built on repeated shared time, and that it takes months rather than weeks.

Where are the other players in your new town?

Less inside clubs than you would think. The 2025 national sports participation barometer, run by INJEP and CREDOC among 4 010 people, shows that 61 % of people in France exercise regularly, but that 53 % do so independently, outside any structure, against 20 % in a club or association.

Another decisive figure: 50 % of participants exercise alone, 20 % with friends, 12 % with family. Most of the people you see running or riding belong to no structure through which you could meet them. That gap is precisely what a matching app fills.

And 45 % of regular participants say they would like to do more. The pool exists, it is simply not gathered anywhere.

Why does regularity matter more than the number of encounters?

Because the only mechanism documented on real people points that way. A 1992 experiment had confederates attend a lecture course zero, five, ten or fifteen times. At the end of the semester, the more often a person had attended, the more likeable students judged her, without even recognising her any better.

It is a single study, in a single context, and it should not be turned into a law. But it points at something experience confirms: coming back to the same slot builds more connection than multiplying one-off meetings. Three sessions with the same people beat ten sessions with ten different groups.

What should you do in the first week?

Pick a fixed slot and hold it for two months, even with three participants. Favour whatever is less than fifteen minutes from home, because distance is the first cause of a new habit collapsing. Come back to the same place rather than exploring, at least at the beginning.

And beware of one reading trap. The feeling of loneliness is more common in large cities than in rural areas, while objectively measured relational isolation is stronger in the countryside. Feeling alone in a crowded city is therefore statistically ordinary, and it is not a sign that you are doing it wrong.