Huge Adult Jungle Gym (with Free Fitness Classes!) Coming to Point Breeze
Smith Playground | Photo by Jesse Fox, Urban Roots
Nearly four years ago, Be Well Philly’s Emily Leaman came back from a trip to San Francisco and showed us Philly folks some photos of what we were missing. No, it was not the food – it was fitness courts, or public outdoor adult jungle gyms of sorts, designed for working out. We’ve been wishing something like this would open up in Philly for years, and now, it looks like City Fitness and Avid Trails are going to bring one to the folks of Point Breeze. (Insert all the hands-clapping emojis here.)
As City Fitness’ marketing director Tom Wingert tells us, City Fitness is teaming up with Connor Barwin’s Make the World Better Project and Urban Roots to bring a public fitness facility, between 2,500 and 3,000 square feet in size, to Smith Playground, a 7.5-acre public park at 24th and Jackson Streets in Point Breeze, currently undergoing a complete renovation.
As Wingert tells us, the outdoor fitness facility, which will be open to the public year-round, will include “permanent structures that will be adapted jungle gym features — things you can do pull-ups, dips, elevated push-ups on, hang TRX cables from, do box jumps onto, that kind of thing.” It will feature all-over rubberized surfacing, along with a turf area for movement-based exercises. Sooooo … it’s basically an adult jungle gym. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The fitness facility will be designed by City Fitness and Avid Trails and, along with being open to anyone and everyone whenever they feel like getting their sweat on, City Fitness will be offering two programs at the facility, free of charge: First off, in the warmer months, they’ll be holding Thrive training camps, group fitness programs that can be adapted to any level of fitness. As Wingert says, “Conceivably, an elite high-school athlete and an elderly person working on getting up a flight of stairs could participate in the same workout and both receive maximum benefit from it.”
And speaking of elite athletes, the second program they’ll be running is a scholarship program offering sport-specific training to local high-school students who meet the athletic, academic and community service-oriented criteria required. Awesome, right?
Wingert says they’re hoping for the fitness facility to be up and running by late 2016. City Fitness will be launching a crowd-funding campaign to complete fundraising for the project and raise awareness “of the enormous collaboration underway to make South Philadelphia a bastion of health and wellness,” as Wingert describes it, in the coming months. Stay tuned!
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