Over the past year, new outdoor gyms have been installed in four Toronto parks: Woodbine Beach Park; Julius Deutsch Park (formerly Cecil Street Parkette) and Sally Bird Park, both in the Annex; and Glen Ravine Park, near Eglinton Avenue East and Midland Avenue. All are public; all are free. The largest, arrayed around the Woodbine Beach playground, has seven stations that can accommodate a total of twelve people, and includes a leg press, seated back row, and elliptical trainer. The smallest, at Sally Bird Park, has three stations—a chest press, air skier, and warm-up-and-stretch station—that can handle four users.

“If we could do this everywhere, we would,” says Catriona Delaney, manager of Get Active Toronto, a nonprofit that helped coordinate placement of the Woodbine and Glen Ravine gyms. “If kids are brought to the playground, but their parents are sitting on benches, what message does that send? We’d like to build a physically active culture by default rather than by mandate.”

This outdoor-fitness trend has some eighty-year-old precedents. In the 1930s, with unemployment at its height, concerns about declines in physical activity, combined with the need for make-work projects, resulted in the construction of walking trails in many parts of Canada. And in the '60s and '70s, governments, warned about the health effects of increasingly sedentary lifestyles, installed wood-and-steel fitness circuits like the Vita Parcours in Sunnybrook Park.

Delaney says that now's the time to further remove barriers to physical activity in Toronto. “We have the fastest-rising obesity rate of any city in the country,” she says. “These gyms are great for people who are just starting to be physically active. And we need that. We don’t all have the means to hire personal trainers, right?”

Toronto may need outdoor gyms the most, but they've spread across the country just the same. “Municipalities are getting a lot of pressure to justify their spend in green spaces,” explains Deb Merry, co-owner of Halifax company GreenGym, which manufactured Toronto's four gyms and has installed nearly one hundred more across Canada in the past four years. “You can put in a playground and that will generate a certain hours of use per day. But add outdoor fitness equipment, and you’ll see the usage of this green space dramatically increase from sunup to sundown.”

Two of Toronto’s new outdoor gyms, at Woodbine Beach and Glen Ravine, were privately funded: they originated when GreenGym donated equipment to ParticipACTION, who sought out location advice from Get Active Toronto, who recommended dividing the equipment between Glen Ravine (a high-needs, low-income area) and Woodbine (which, given its running trails and volleyball courts, is already a locus for physical activity).

The Sally Bird and Julius Deutsch gyms, on the other hand, were classified as “playground improvements,” and were funded jointly by the City, Ontario’s infrastructure program, and the feds’ Economic Action Plan. Michael Schreiner, manager of capital projects for the City of Toronto, says that this particular type of playground improvement—rowing machines rather than swing sets or benches—was decided through community consultation and the support of councillor Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity–Spadina), whose interest was sparked when he saw the gyms at a Federation of Canadian Municipalities trade fair. There are plenty more possibilities for outdoor gyms in Toronto, Schreiner says. “Probably in the next ten years, we have fifty identified locations for playground improvements." But, he adds, nothing's confirmed yet. "We can’t say now whether that would create a kid’s playground, an adult playground, or a combination. That’s decided through public consultation, and each is unique."

Despite the excitement for more outdoor gyms, there are some concerns about their being truly fit for the public. In August, the Town of Oakville removed a GreenGym after a nine-year-old girl severed her finger using it. The $15,000 gym had been installed just two months prior. Nina de Vaal, director of recreation and culture for the Town of Oakville, says the equipment has been removed “until we have completed a total review” of the gym’s safety aspects. That's because the Canadian Safety Association does not regulate workout equipment; it’s maintained a Children’s Playspaces and Equipment standard since 1990, but outdoor gyms are not governed by it. Signage around Toronto’s outdoor gyms, meanwhile, warns that “usage of the park and its equipment is for healthy individuals aged 12 and over,” and is undertaken at one’s own risk. (Users are also advised to keep children at least four feet away from moving parts.)

Some experts are concerned, too, that the gyms could limit ideas about health. “I’m cautious because it’s a signal about how we should live, how we should be fit,” says Caroline Fusco, associate professor of physical education and health at the University of Toronto. “Working out on exercise machines is a very North American way to think about fitness and health. It also presumes a knowledge of fitness and health that usually goes with more middle-class incomes.” Fusco's point about class might be particularly salient for Toronto: though the gyms are trumpeted for their economic accessibility, only one of the four, at Glen Ravine, is in a low-income area—and it’s on the smaller side.

But even Fusco, who's used the Woodbine Beach gym herself, admits there’s something that feels right about the workout, especially this time of year. “You can be in a park, and it’s freezing, and you’re in your parka and snowpants, doing leg presses,” she smiles. “It’s very Canadian.”