OBJECTIVES: To describe primary care (PC) physicians’ attitudes towards their health and work in order to segment them in typological groups, and to establish the relationship between self-perceived cardiovascular (CV) health of physicians with the recommendations to their patients. METHODS: Cross-sectional study, through a survey, on PC physicians in Spain. Data on socio-demographic, self-perceived CV risk and self-assessed consistency between recommendations and personal practice were collected. The attitude of physicians was estimated based on the degree of agreement to a set of given phrases. A cluster analysis was performed to identify population segments. RESULTS: A total of 2,583 physicians were recruited (53.4% women, mean±SD age 44.9±9.3 years), 77.6% of them had ≥10 years of professional experience. 76.6% perceived their current CV risk as low, 19.9% moderate and 3.5% high. The different physicians’ attitudes clustered them into two general groups and five subgroups: 40% of physicians were classified as proactive and close to their patients (24% of them were seeing by the patients as an example, and 16% were strongly motivated and responsible), and 60% were grouped as distant and sceptical (20% reserved and distant, without influence of professional experience in self-care, 20% self-critical, sceptical that their knowledge and health may influence their patients, and 20% unmotivated and critical with the system). 76.6% of physicians considered to be fairly or completely consistent between what they did and what they recommended to their patients. Twenty-four percent of physicians with more years of experience were completely consistent vs. 18.7% with less experience (p<0.01). By gender, 24.3% of men were completely consistent vs. 21.6% of women (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Only four out of ten physicians were close to their patients and eight considered having a low CV risk and declared to be consistent between what they do and what they recommend to their patients.