Unlike a “typical” gym, a gym can offer health and fitness activities both indoors and outdoors. A gym is often larger than your average gym, especially if it includes amenities such as an outdoor pool, golf course, or jogging tracks. The term “health club” first appeared in the mid-1900s on the sandy beaches of Santa Monica, California, and is generally interchanged with the term gym. Before that, they were simply classified as gyms.
Health clubs come in various shapes and sizes with different services and costs. The only thing that differs from gyms is their dedication to fitness as a lifestyle. While health clubs have the weights and cardiovascular equipment of a gym, they outperform gyms in terms of services and classes. A health club offers additional benefits such as showers, changing rooms, swimming pools, clinics, sports courts, and anything else that can transform it into a first-class fitness machine.
At Purlife in Delray Beach, we offer our members intense group classes, lockers, showers, a juice bar, physical treatments and even a full-service hair salon. These old gyms were areas that encouraged physical fitness, demonstrating that a taut, toned body and peak performance were a human concern long before the existence of diet pills. Fitness centers tend to take up more space than a gym because they tend to offer both indoor and outdoor physical activities, such as a swimming pool, an athletic track or a golf course. If you're thinking of joining a gym, fitness center or health club, it's best to leave out the terminology and choose the center that best suits your health and fitness goals, your budget and your personality.
Most fitness centers will also have personal trainers and nutritionists available to educate clients on how to use the equipment or how to design the most appropriate meal plan to achieve their fitness goals. Generally speaking, fitness centers offer the same machines, weights and equipment as a gym, but they also offer a greater variety of services, group fitness classes, and certified staff. Health clubs usually have all the features of gyms and fitness centers because they offer certified staff with personal trainers, individual and group fitness classes, a variety of equipment, a variety of services (pool, steam room, sauna, etc. Generally speaking, a health club is more like a gym than a gym because it focuses on the well-being of the whole body and not just physical fitness).
Most gyms have personal trainers available, but not as many group fitness classes as a gym or gym. But what about all these terms that are used today to describe a physical activity center? Gyms? Health club? Fitness centers? What's going on? It was the ancient Greeks who coined the term gymnastics and where the gym went from promoting not only physical fitness, but also education, with the sports libraries of most gyms.
