Proposal talk:Gym

alternative name

I'd prefer sport=fitness or sport=fitness_studio or something (see wikipedia:Health club). I think gym should be used to tag what's a Turnhalle or Sporthalle in German (see wikipedia:Gym), for instance as building=gym possibly in conjunction with sport=*. Robx 10:29, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

• I deem a gym is within the leisure=sports_centre physical tag scope, best with an additional sport specifier ( sport=fitness sounds good). Kaitu 21:49, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
• I agree with Kaitu and RobX on this --PhilippeP 08:15, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
• +1, should definitely be a sport tag, and "fitness" is better than "gym". --Eimai 11:43, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I personally think amenity=gym would be the most logical choice as it can then be used to incorporate private, public and council ran facilities. --Salkunh 22:31, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

• Another +1 from for for making it sport=<something>, (ideally fitness or exercise), combined with the existing leisure=*. If you need further subdivisions, suggest fitness=* (or gym=*, or exercise=*) --achadwick 15:03, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
• Some gyms offer health advice and saunas, neither of those are a sport. In general a gym is a health club, not a sport club. therefor I think it should be amenity=gym. --Outsider 19:14, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
  • In my opinion we would benefit from a more general category like leisure=wellness_centre. A subtag would specify the services offered (gym, sauna, spa, solarium, massage, etc.). -Kaitu 13:24, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I’ve been looking for this for some time now, too. In my opinion, we need to separate two kinds of gyms:

• A commercial one, where you go at any time and pay money for using it for a specified time. (This is what a sports_centre is for me.) Commercial gyms are limited to one or a few kinds of sports you can do there (squash, tennis, badminton, fitness for example). This might be interesting for a visitor of the town, who only stays for a short while and wants to do some sports in his leisure time.
• A non-commercial one, usually belonging to a school or to a non-profit organisation. (This is what a “gym” is for me.) You have to be in a club to use it, the members of the club meet at specified times every week to play. Clubs can use these gyms to hold a tournament. In contrast to commercial gyms, the user decides which sport he wants to do at the gym, there may exist equipment for gymnastics, football, basketball, volleyball, table-tennis, climbing and so on. This is mostly interesting for the inhabitants of a town (especially pupils and members of a sports club) and for foreign clubs visiting the gym for a tournament.

The point that the two kinds of gyms are interesting to different groups of people is in my opinion important enough to have two different tags. Alternatively, we could introduce a new tag to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial sport facilities, as pitches may also be commercial (golf) or non-commercial (football for example). --Candid Dauth 00:28, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

This might be counter-intuitive in the US. The place where you pay a daily/monthly/annual fee to lift weights, ride stationary bikes, use treadmills, etc. is commonly known as a "gym". If it additionally has sports facilities, like squash, handball, etc., it is common for the operator to add "sports" to the name to indicate this. I like amenity=gym. Add access=private for schools and private clubs that require membership, access=permissive (or something else?) for a place that one can pay a day fee to use, and no access tag for a public/free facility. AM909 12:49, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes and in the UK too. The thing we normally associate with the word gym is very much a commercial thing (ruthlessly commercial with evil binding contracts in fact!) Looking at all of the above comments I'd say we have several german people not using the word "Gym" in the way english/U.S. people do. This is a classic example of needing to define what the word means, even though we might have thought it was obvious. Currently this proposal gives no definition. We need a clear definition with photos. The proposal should also define how this tag will relate to (be distinguished from) leisure=sports_centre -- Harry Wood 23:15, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

For me as a Norwegian speaker that have emigrated to a Portuguese speaking country, Gym is the sport gymnastics (sport=gymnastic), health and fitness clubs are respectively helsestudio (no) and academia (pt). I see no point in not having a sport=fitness, which can be combined with any leisure=*. If leisure=sports_centre doesn't fit, what about leisure=health_centre (which in fact also can accommodate spa and other forms of "health activities". I know for a fact that many such places also offers other services such as shop=kiosk, amenity=cafe, shop=sports. Setting a tag amenity=gym will enduce confusion (if not extremely well defined in the description) and be limited in use, resulting in many other tags. Keep it clean and keep it simple, avoid double meanings, interpretations and such. --Skippern 00:01, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

What are these currently tagged as? I'm seeing 22 instances of sport=gym; 63 amenity=gym and 36 for sport=fitness. I can't believe these are the only 'gyms' tagged on osm! They are really common here, I can instantly think of more than 10 in my small city, and I'm sure there are many more. On the other hand I'm seeing 1485 instances of sport=gymnastics, which isn't really defined on the wiki! Maybe people confuse this as a gym (weight lifting/treadmills etc) or are osmers just really enthusiastic gymnasts?

Looks like an enthusiastic bot has changed all the sport=gym to sport=gymnastics… —Lorp 02:12, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Just trying to figure out what should I use for now, as I don't see this proposal ever going through as it is, but I'm not a native speaker so i really can't figure out a good tag to use. --Pfr 10:15, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Best way to make things clear to non native speakers are photos, photos, photos! --Lulu-Ann 12:25, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

One year later, hows about flicking a coin to decide? I'm new to openstreetmap and want to tag gyms and climbing walls in my area/london. User:Sentimental.bryan 22:32, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree with bryan, apparently this discussion has started in '08 and we still didn't come to terms. Let's put this tag to vote at once! While we don't, I believe I can uniquely collaborate to the discussion. I have lived in a few countries, such as Italy, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland, and currently I live in Brazil. I agree that in european countries the term 'gym' isn't used that often and when used it's to refer to a place which includes a multitude of activities, related to health. As mentioned above, a 'gym', according to a more european definition, often includes a sauna, maybe a massage parlor, a swimming pool and different sports, such as tennis, squash, soccer, etc. where there isn't such a big focus on mere dumbbell lifting. My german friends tend to call such a place a 'fitness studio'. I believe that this kind of facility is more appropriately tagged as leisure=sports_centre. On the other hand, in Brazil, and most likely also in the US, that kind of multi-activity facilities is quite uncommon, and very often a place that offers equipments for weight lifting exclusively offers only those, and doesn't include any other parallell activity. Particularly in Brazil, sometimes gyms offer martial arts, but places that take martial arts more seriously are usually in a separate kind of facility, called a amenity=dojo. (Please note there has been a [project of the week to map 'gyms' and 'dojos'|http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/2011/May_04] already, before we even put this tag to a vote) So, I propose we do create the amenity=gym tag and in its description include this disparity in EU/Worldwide definition, putting links to other tags that may be more suitable. I please ask understanding from the european community, but honestly I believe the definition for 'gym' adopted in Brazil and US is the most common one worldwide, and forcing the european definition will cause severe tagging disparity since no brazilian would ever tag a gym as a leisure=sports_centre or leisure=health_centre, but most definitely as amenity=gym.

Cheers everybody! --D4RK-L3G10N 13:28, 23 July 2011 (BST)

A "gym" is an empty hall for sports activities. A "fitness center" is a hall for sports activities where sports devices are build up all the time. Lulu-Ann

Yeah It doesn't matter how many times people say the thing about "gym"=="gymnasium". Nobody is disputing the origin of the word, but that's not how we (in the UK and North America i.e. most of the native english speaking world) use the word most often. Until we do something about it, we'll get a constant stream of english speaking folk looking for how to map a health/fitness centre, searching for the word "gym", and blundering into this mess.

-- Harry Wood 01:45, 14 June 2012 (BST)

Please see Tag:amenity=gym. Removing proposal text

Since march we've had a page at Tag:amenity=gym which advised people against using the tag because the word "gym" is ambiguous. That seems sensible to me, and I've just added a whole bunch of explanation and photos to run through why it is ambiguous. Please everybody have a look at that. Since I think we can actually all agree that "gym" is ambiguous / confusing, please let's have a discussion now about what tags should be used (for both meanings), over at Talk:Tag:amenity=gym. Perhaps we should move this discussion there.

As for this proposal page, it was created back in 2008 by a Romanian guy who clearly had no idea what kind of confusion it would cause. He failed to state what his actual intended us of the word was (supplying a photo would have solved this) I can see no value in this proposal text, so I'm now going to remove all of it and just tell people to go look at Tag:amenity=gym page

-- Harry Wood 01:45, 14 June 2012 (BST)

leisure, not amenity

This kind of feature I would normally expect in the leisure=* namespace, not in amenity=* -Dieterdreist 12:50, 11 February 2012 (UTC)