The “Why”: The Unique Benefits of Outdoor Fitness Parks

The MSCLE Project firmly believes that our entire community, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic status, and fitness ability should have equal opportunities to access and engage in physical activity and the pursuit of personal fitness and wellbeing.  Everybody deserves to have the opportunity to live their best life through a healthy active lifestyle, play and physical fitness.

Key benefits include:

• Community engagement and motivation: 

  • Outdoor fitness parks play a vital role in motivating people of all ages and levels of fitness toward achieving a healthier, more active, and more productive life

• Free for all to use regardless of level of fitness: 

  • The potential to positively impact health through outdoor parks is limitless, as this provides communities a low-cost environment to engage in fitness which removes the socioeconomic barriers to health and well-being through the pursuit of physical activity and fitness.

• Provides a social outlet through exercise: 

  • Friends and fellow community members can congregate at these parks and engage in fitness activities with the ability to be socially supportive to one other, which will reduce social isolation and provide help foster supportive exercise groups

• Act as a catalyst to encourage the inactive population to become active:  

  • A major barrier to engaging in physical activity beyond walking is the financial cost of purchasing exercise equipment, or going to a fitness facility that has equipment.  By providing exercise platforms and structures by which they can use the best weight equipment available to them, their own body weight, and providing instructions with signage and QR coded videos, then this barrier to engaging with physical activity is removed.

• Engaging adults and kids to be physically active together:  

  • There is no age limit, young or old, as to who has access or can use this equipment.  However, we hope to install these outdoor fitness parks and stations in places where people already are watching their kids play their sports, or their kids playing on playgrounds, or places where community members are already visiting or getting together.  Again, this is meant to minimize the barriers to accessing fitness equipment and getting engaged in their pursuit of a healthy lifestyle.

  • Exercise can be seen as active play.  With obstacle courses, ropes structures, and challenges to complete, exercise can be so much more than squats, pushups, sit ups and so much more.

• These parks support “Community Capital”:

  • This means that fitness parks promote the growth of a healthy community by attracting community members to utilize the equipment.  Then these individuals will encourage other members who aren’t yet active or looking for ways to be active to become active as well.  And so on.

• There is an abundance of research to support the positive impact of outdoor fitness parks on the health and well being of a community and its residents:

  • 75% of participants in a large UK study agreed that these parks, when free and accessible, have widespread benefits to their health, and the well being of their community.  

  • Positive attitudes about the health benefits and accessibility was associated with greater use of the equipment

  • 65% of participants used the equipment regularly, with the 55% of these participants visiting them on two or more occasions each week.

  • 70% of participants agreed or strongly agreed that the equipment had an overall positive impact on their physical and mental health.

  • Aesthetic design, intuitive equipment and functional layouts all contributed to improved user experience, and this was a predictor of use and engagement with the equipment in the parks.

  • Participants overwhelmingly agreed that they were able to achieve the same level of intensity that they would have achieved by working out in an indoor fitness facility for a variety of standard exercises.