This post advocates for the increased construction of public outdoor gyms in our local municipalities. A public outdoor gym increases accessibility to fitness, connects a community, and helps people learn what they can do to get and stay fit.

Going Beyond the Jungle Gym

Regular fitness and exercise is key to a healthy life. We know this, our schools assert this, and our governments advocate this.

Why is it that more municipalities don’t provide public outdoor gyms?

We are constantly warned of the ever-looming threats from high obesity rates and sedentary lifestyles, yet our communities rarely do more to facilitate accessible public fitness beyond children’s playgrounds and the occasional open field or basketball court. Worse still, good gym equipment often hides behind expensive club dues, confusing membership fees, and obstructive fitness mentalities._¹

Our cities and towns must do more to make fitness more accessible. One of the first places we should look is our public parks. Open grass is nice, but features can be added to further incentivize fitness in a cost-effective manner. Where there’s a field, there can be a pull-up bar.

¹While I do think we all have access to a good gym at home, I recognize that gyms provide people with an opportunity to schedule fitness into their lives and may make fitness more fun. We should provide diverse avenues to achieve fitness if we want to increase success.

Public Fitness Should be More Than the Basketball Court

Exercise is more than sports. However, when most cities and towns attempt to promote public fitness, they often do so in limited, sport-centric capacities: basketball courts, tennis courts, and the occasional pickleball court.

Don’t get me wrong, courts are great. Courts can promote community activities, collaborative sports, and overall physical well-being. They just aren’t enough. To compliment the abundant sports courts and complexes we find in our communities, towns and cities should strongly consider providing public outdoor gyms (often referred to as calisthenics parks, given their calisthenics focus).

Public outdoor gyms provide a community with inexpensive access to quality fitness resources. These fitness resources can be partnered with structured workout lessons,² helping citizens learn to use their local resources and engage with their community. Furthermore, public outdoor gyms present a chance for people to become active and social in local group settings, sparking friendships, connections, and community growth.³

If we really want to increase fitness in our communities, public outdoor gyms should be a no-brainer.

² Towns and cities are already providing community-sponsored public fitness lessons. Some examples from my local community here, here, and here.

³ We often see this with run clubs, which are growing alongside running’s popularity.

Public Outdoor Gyms Promote Physical Well-Being

Public outdoor gyms make it known that the municipality providing them wants to make fitness a priority. Unlike sports fields and playgrounds, which are core staples to most any community’s parks and recreation department, public outdoor gyms create a space designed for people of all ages to pursue fitness in public.

This deliberate public focus on fitness normalizes that activity, making it easier for people of all skill levels to engage in exercise and fitness.

Without a designated outdoor gym, public fitness typically falls short in two areas: lack of comfort publicly engaging in fitness activities and ability to easily train diverse movements.

Public Outdoor Gyms Welcome Community Exercise

Public parks are meant to be used by the public for their benefit, but we can certainly struggle to feel that way. A public outdoor gym tells people it’s ok (and even expected) for them to use the park to exercise. Without that, it can simply feel a little weird going to a park to exercise.

When I lived in an apartment, I used to bike to the local park so I could have a space to jump rope and practice bodyweight workouts. I did it because it was the best way for me to stay active outside, but it certainly felt awkward at times.

Instead of having a space designed for exercise, I would often be at the edge of a basketball court or at a dirt patch between a playground and field. This is all I needed for my workouts, but there is no escaping the implicit sensation that the space should be left for kids to play on the swing set in peace or for hoopers to hoop alone.

A public outdoor gym provides signage (and, hopefully, other users) to let people know that the space is specifically for people to be able to exercise. This increases knowledge of the available fitness space, makes people feel more comfortable exercising in their public parks, and makes exercise more accessible.

Public Outdoor Gyms Make it Easy to Train Diverse Movements

While we can do most exercises with what we have around the home, it can be much easier when we have tools that help us access movements and train various techniques. A public outdoor gym would do just that, providing community members with durable tools that let them more easily learn how their bodies move.

Public outdoor gyms can give a community access to pull up bars, dip stations, benches, bikes, and whatever other features the municipality feels fit to offer. When paired with regular users and fitness knowledge, public gyms are a fantastic way for a community to build its citizens’ physical well-being.

Public Outdoor Gyms Support Fitness Education

A community can support and develop its local fitness education through construction of public outdoor gyms.

While we tend to disregard the academic rigor of developing effective and durable fitness practices, we can see all around us how fitness can evade daily life. Weight control issues, lingering injuries, and sedentary lives are some of the major symptoms of ineffective public fitness education.

We have good fitness information available. We have talented experts and all sorts of fitness media (although it can often be contradictory, which is a topic to be discussed in a future article). What we are missing is connectors that bridge the gaps between discipline knowledge and the public market. That’s where public gyms come into play.

Public Outdoor Gyms as Fitness Connectors

Public gyms can serve multiple fitness education purposes. First, it in its structure and public parks visibility can serve as a nudge toward fitness. If people go to the park and begin seeing a new public gym, they may build the association that their community more strongly emphasizes exercise. Further, they may recognize that it’s now easier to access fitness equipment. These factors can bump them into fitness without any additional advertisement or media.

Second, public outdoor gyms can connect accessible fitness equipment with various educational resources, which can be accessed during a workout at the gym or afterward to improve technique or training. This can be done with posted instructionals or scannable QR codes linking to resources. We often see informational provided in our private gyms, but if we treat a public outdoor gym more like an arboretum, where people can go into nature and learn about what they are seeing through curated resources, we can make for a more engaging and thoughtful fitness experience.

Finally, public outdoor gyms can create fit communities, which are able to support knowledge, promulgate it (with the outdoor gym as a central resource point), and perpetuate fitness learning in our communities. This will be discussed further below.

Public Outdoor Gyms Develop Fit Communities

A community can more easily grow when it has a common space to meet and collaborate. Clubs, organizations, and other collectives generally revolve around creating a center of activity. By providing a place to meet and interact, we promote the flow of ideas, information, and education.

While many communities and schools of thought can flourish online (we do live in the digital age, after all), fitness communities benefit from a public nexus that allows them to interweave knowledge conveyance into experiential learning.

Public outdoor gyms serve as a community location focused on accessible fitness. These locations allow interested individuals to bridge age gaps, personal differences, and communication barriers in favor of fitness. With a public outdoor gym, a community gains the ability for people to enter a location to study fitness. This way, both new and experienced fitness practitioners can meet to share techniques, tell war stories, and otherwise bond over their joint fitness venture.

Public Outdoor Gyms Build Confidence

Possibly the most important part of a public outdoor gym’s community creation is that it makes people feel more safe and confident learning about new areas of fitness and techniques. With a community, people have a place they can go with people who care about what they do. They can ask questions they might otherwise fear approaching in the traditional gym setting, allowing them to learn and embolden themselves in pursuit of physical well-being.

Arguments Against Public Outdoor Gyms

No idea comes without its drawbacks. While I believe that public outdoor gyms are key to developing community-wide fitness, they do pose potential drawbacks. These drawbacks come from three major areas: cost, crime, safety.

Public Outdoor Gyms Are Expensive

An outdoor gym isn’t a cheap venture. These public workout facilities can range from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand dollars depending on their size, sophistication, and variety of equipment (with prices averaging in the $15,000-35,000 range). While these numbers are substantial for most individuals, they fall in line with expected playground costs and provide a great return on investment (consider this Los Angeles initiative’s feedback).

We invest money for our kids to play publicly and interact on the playground. It’s important we also invest in accessible well-being for all.

Public Outdoor Gyms Attract Bad Actors

Ask about a public gym in, well, public, and you’ll often be met with this response. People fear that installing pull-up bars in the park will promote illicit activities and loitering, scaring people away from the parks that are meant to be their safe space.

The idea behind outdoor gyms attracting bad people is simple: outdoor gyms provide a public place to congregate. These areas, if unregulated, allow people without a place to go to collect. People without a place to go are generally down on their luck, making them more likely to do bad. Combine this all with the testosterone-boosting gym environment, and bad is bound to happen.

While it’s possible that pull-up bars attract bad guys (as fit people are evil, of course), it’s also possible that public outdoor gyms provide an avenue for people to build community and find support in otherwise difficult situations.

Public Gyms as Low-Income Safe Havens

Since the mid-20th century, America has used public fitness facilities as a way to improve quality of life and make fitness more accessible. Public fitness resources are regularly provided as an alternative activity to people in bad situations, so they are able to make productive steps toward bettering their lives.

We often see community efforts to provide accessible fitness programs, and these programs would be complimented with facilities that make a wider range of fitness activities available. Public outdoor gyms can be inexpensive ways to improve health and quality of life in lower-income communities (as well as all other communities), possibly serving as a resource to channel bad actors toward better outlets.

Public Outdoor Gyms Are Dangerous

Now this one might be the lawyer in me, but public outdoor gyms certainly pose a risk of injury. Public outdoor gyms provide access to big metal structures on hard surfaces. You can just imagine the ways someone can hurt themselves (and if you don’t want to use your imagination, think of how many people you may find using your outdoor gyms like this, this, or this).

Fortunately, many municipalities have recreational use statutes, which often provide partial immunity to landowners that make all or a portion of their land available for public recreational use without charge (example).⁴

⁴ Note: nothing provided in this article (or on this website in general) should be construed as legal advice. These posts and pages are designed to provide general information and advocate for public well-being. If you are concerned about a legal issue, please consider consulting an attorney in your jurisdiction.

Municipalities Should Design Public Outdoor Gyms Carefully

A town considering a public outdoor gyms should certainly consider its legal implications and risks to public safety, but they should also recognize that they regularly make similar risks available to children with playgrounds. If kids can throw themselves on monkey bars, adults should be able to do a pull up or two.

Municipalities can avoid unnecessary risks posed by their public outdoor gyms by considering location, gym equipment, and supervision. If a community fears injury risks, they can reduce moving parts in their fitness equipment (ex. sticking with pull up/dip bars rather than ellipticals or stationery bikes), hire trainers, and separate the gym from the playground. The health benefits from a public outdoor gym should outweigh its risks, but a town is wise to approach construction carefully.

Public Outdoor Gyms Are Ugly

I can see where people might be coming from with this one. The idea of a gym isn’t one that most naturally lends itself to associations with aesthetically-pleasing concepts and structures.

Bulky metal weights, sterile walls and durable floor mats surround a conventional gym designed for durability rather than aesthetics. Especially considering how public outdoor gyms need to be hearty enough to withstand weather, it is easy to conclude that they will create an eyesore for our valued local parks.

However, public outdoor gyms can be art pieces just as much as they are functional workout spaces. Consider this article for examples of city art gyms, which combine the aesthetics of public art with the functionality of an outdoor public gym. Also consider this campaign for examples of aesthetic public outdoor gyms.

A gym certainly can be ugly, but its looks are something that can be controlled and customized by any interested community.

Conclusion

Outdoor gyms aren’t new, and they’ve been providing easy access to fitness for decades. Public outdoor gyms are growing in popularity for a reason, but there is still much more to be done.

When we add an outdoor gym to our city or town, we make it easier for people to access fitness, helping them get on a path toward a happier, healthier, and more sustainable future.

We must do what we can to keep people active and healthy. All cities should strongly consider adding a public outdoor gym to their list of parks. These steps will keep our kids moving stronger, longer, and more safely.

Thoughts, questions, or concerns? Let me know!

-G

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