In June 2026 I was invited to speak at Elevate Arena, the UK fitness industry’s flagship professional event. The panel I was part of tackled a set of questions that, on the surface, might seem like provocations: Are gyms becoming playgrounds for adults? Is physical literacy more important than fitness? Are movement spaces replacing pubs as the social infrastructure of modern life? How do we make play acceptable for adults without infantilising them?
These are not small questions. They go to the heart of what fitness culture is actually for, who it serves, and whether the industry’s dominant model is producing the outcomes it claims to. The discussion at Elevate was lively and, I think, genuinely important.
Here’s a provocation I regularly raise with people: the most physically literate version of you has probably already existed. It was you at age seven, scrambling up a tree, jumping off a wall, rolling down a hill for no reason other than the fact that rolling down hills is great fun. You weren’t training; you weren’t optimising – you were just playing. And in doing so, you were developing motor skills, spatial awareness, proprioception, risk assessment, social coordination, and genuine physical literacy at a rate that most will almost certainly never match again as an adult.
So what happened?
The short answer is that we stopped playing and started exercising. And those two things, despite looking similar from the outside, are almost opposites in terms of what they do to a human being.
The Difference Between a Gym and a Playground
Walk into most commercial gyms and you’ll find rows of machines designed to isolate specific muscle groups, screens to distract you from the fact that you’re essentially going nowhere on a glorified conveyor belt, and programming built around the relentless logic of optimisation: more weight, more reps, better numbers, better body. The implicit promise is always aesthetic. Lose this, gain that, look like this person on the poster who has never looked like that person on the poster in real life.
Now walk into a playground and watch what’s happening: children are hanging, dropping, climbing, misjudging, laughing, falling, failing, trying again. The environment itself is generating the challenge. There is no prescribed movement pattern. The child and the space are in genuine dialogue, and from that dialogue comes something extraordinary: a human being learning how to move, how to fall, how to read a physical situation, how to adapt. They are becoming physically literate.
Physical literacy, for those not yet familiar with the term, is not the same as fitness. Fitness is a set of measurable capacities: how strong you are, how fast, how long you can sustain effort. Important capacities, for sure, but simplistic. Physical literacy is something deeper. It is the motivation, confidence, competence, and understanding to take responsibility for physical activity across a lifetime. It is your relationship and confidence with movement itself, not just your performance within any specific modality.
And here is the uncomfortable data point: only around 30% of adults are physically literate, according to the International Physical Literacy Association. Meanwhile, gym membership continues to rise. People are working out more than ever and becoming better movers less than ever. That tells you something important about what conventional fitness culture is actually building, and what it is not.
Play Is Not What You Think It Is
When most adults hear the word play, they think of something trivial. Something you grow out of. Something for children and weekends, not for serious people with serious physical goals. This is precisely the misunderstanding that is costing us, because the science of play is unambiguous: play is not a childish regression. It is a fundamental biological process that the human nervous system requires throughout life to remain adaptable, creative, and healthy.
Stuart Brown’s research at the National Institute for Play documents play as essential to adult neurological health, stress regulation, creativity, and social bonding. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified PLAY as one of the primary emotional operating systems in mammals, producing a specific neurochemical environment that reinforces curiosity, exploration, and the motivation to keep moving. This is not a soft argument about fun. It is a hard argument about neuroplasticity, long-term physical engagement, and what actually keeps human beings moving throughout a life rather than quitting the gym for the fourth time in January.
So what actually defines play? Because it is worth being precise here.
Play is intrinsically motivated. You do it because the doing is the point, not because of what it produces. The moment an activity becomes primarily a means to an external end, it shifts categories psychologically, even if the movements look identical from the outside.
Play generates positive affect. Not ease, not comfort, but a particular emotional signature: engaged, absorbed, wanting to continue. Play can be hard, frustrating, even briefly painful, but the overall pull is always towards more, not less.
Play is voluntary: coerce it and it collapses. This has direct implications for how fitness spaces are designed and how coaches speak to people.
Play reduces self-consciousness. In genuine play, the self-monitor quiets down. The performer stops watching themselves perform and becomes absorbed in the task. Adults lose this more readily than children because our identity is more heavily invested in how we appear when we move. A movement practice that creates the conditions for this kind of absorption is doing something genuinely unusual and genuinely valuable.
Play produces variability. A child kicking a ball does not kick it the same way twice, does not hold the same position, does not maintain the same intensity. This variability looks like inefficiency. It is actually the mechanism by which the motor system maps the full possibility space of a movement. Structured exercise eliminates this variability deliberately, which is precisely why it produces competence within a narrow domain rather than broad capability across many.
And, crucially, play is socially embedded. This means it does not occur in isolation. It is woven into relationships, shared spaces, ongoing stories, and mutual meaning. This is why children play together in ways that build social intelligence alongside motor intelligence, and it is why the most successful adult movement communities, the climbing gyms, the parkour groups, the martial arts schools, function as social ecosystems as much as physical ones. The activity is not separate from the social life; it is the mechanism of the social life.
Parkour, Climbing, and What the Traditional Gym Has Forgotten
‘Play is a primary process of the brain. It is not a luxury. It is a necessity.’
– Jaak Panksepp
The activities that are genuinely changing how people relate to movement share a set of qualities that conventional gym programming has largely abandoned. Parkour, climbing, acrobatics, rough-housing: in each of these, the environment or the opponent itself generates the challenge. In climbing, the wall tells you what to do and you either solve it or you do not. In parkour, the space presents affordances that invite creative, varied, unpredictable responses. The human body and the environment are in genuine dialogue.
This matters enormously. The research on ecological dynamics and motor learning, associated with the work of Gibson, Davids, and Araújo, demonstrates that humans learn and adapt movement best when the environment presents varied, unpredictable challenges rather than fixed, repeatable patterns. A playground does this naturally and effortlessly: a leg press machine does not do it at all.
These disciplines also make failure visible and normal. You fall off the wall. You do not make the gap. You try again. The process is public, but because the community normalises it, it is not humiliating. It is just part of how you get better. This is play in its most technically precise sense: a safe-enough context in which genuine exploration is possible, in which trying and failing carries no catastrophic social cost. The psychologist Donald Winnicott called this a “holding environment.” It is exactly what the average commercial gym, with its mirrors and its performance culture and its implicit competition over aesthetics, conspicuously fails to provide.
What about activities like Hyrox? They’re tough and they clearly meet a real appetite, at least within a specific demographic of adtuls. But Hyrox is probably better understood as the ultimate adult sports day than the ultimate adult playground. The movements are largely predetermined, the format is highly structured, and the primary driver is competitive performance. It is adult sport, and sport is valuable, don’t get me wrong. But sport is not the same as play. The open-endedness, the intrinsic motivation, the variability, the purposeful purposelessness: these are mostly absent. Hyrox will make you fitter, yes. But it will not necessarily make you a better mover, or rebuild a better relationship with movement itself.
Are Gyms the New Pubs?
There is something genuinely interesting happening in the social geography of adult life. Pub attendance across the UK has declined steadily for two decades. Simultaneously, boutique fitness communities have grown dramatically, and their appeal is explicitly social as much as physical. People join CrossFit boxes, climbing gyms, parkour groups, and running clubs partly for the training, but also for the community, the shared identity, and the ritual of gathering with the same people around a shared endeavour.
The sociological parallel is precise in some ways: a regular time, a known space, a group of familiar faces, a mild challenge that produces conversation and bonds people together. What the movement community adds that the pub traditionally did not is a shared productive endeavour. You are not just consuming together; you are doing something together. That distinction may explain the unusual loyalty and depth of identity that characterises communities built around activities like parkour, climbing, or martial arts in a way that a standard gym membership almost never produces.
The caveat is access and diversity. Pubs historically served a very wide cross-section of society. Many fitness communities remain demographically narrow: younger, more affluent, more able-bodied. Until gyms are genuinely accessible across class, age, and physical capacity, the idea that they are replacing the pub as social infrastructure is partial at best. The ambition is right, but the execution has further to go.
De-Emphasising Aesthetics Without Abandoning Excellence
The fitness industry defaults to aesthetics because aesthetics are legible, measurable, and easy to sell. “Lose 10 kilos” is a cleaner proposition than “become a more capable human being.” But the evidence on motivation is consistent: intrinsic drivers, including the experience of fun, social connection, and genuine competence, produce far better long-term engagement than extrinsic ones like appearance. People who exercise primarily to look better stop exercising the moment the results plateau, the mirror stops cooperating, or life becomes complicated enough that the aesthetic return on effort no longer seems worth it. People who move because they love moving, because they feel competent and connected and alive when they do it, tend not to stop.
Practically, moving away from aesthetic culture means: building programming around skills and capacities rather than body composition; celebrating what people can do rather than how they look; designing environments where the experience of movement itself is the reward, not the measurement of the body’s response to it. None of this is soft or unambitious. It is, in fact, a considerably more demanding vision of physical development than “here is your macro split.”
The language matters too. “Training” implies a predetermined outcome to be achieved. “Playing” implies a process to be inhabited. “Workout” implies work, obligation, something to get through. The vocabulary of exploration, skill, and discovery is more honest about what actually sustains human beings in physical activity across decades rather than quarters. However, most adults don’t want to perceive themselves as ‘playing’, and for good reason: they’re not children anymore. Their self-image has shifted, naturally, and they seek endeavours that ‘feel’ more serious. But that doesn’t mean the activity itself cannot be playful in nature.
Making Play Acceptable Without Making It Infantile
This is the most culturally delicate part of the whole project. Adults are rightly resistant to being condescended to. Tell a serious, capable person to “just play” and you have almost certainly lost them. The reframe that actually works is not “let yourself be a child again.” It is: engage in the process that actually produces mastery, adaptability, and long-term physical capability.
That is a serious proposition. It is what the evidence from developmental science, motor learning research, and psychology consistently points toward. The nervous system learns best through exploration, not compliance. The body adapts most durably through varied, unpredictable, environment-driven challenge, not through repeated mechanical patterns. The human being remains physically engaged over a lifetime through intrinsic motivation and social meaning, not through aesthetic anxiety and metric obsession.
Parkour has navigated this well. The practice is technically demanding, physically serious, and philosophically rich. It is also evidently joyful, exploratory, and playful in the deepest sense of that word. The seriousness of the practice provides the permission for the playfulness of the approach. Nobody who watches a skilled practitioner move through an environment with creativity and precision thinks they are watching someone being childish. They are watching someone who has done something far more difficult than building a bigger deadlift: they have rebuilt their relationship with movement from the ground up, and in doing so, have become genuinely capable in the broadest possible sense.
What the Gym of the Future Looks Like
It looks less like a machine room and more like a very well-designed playground for adults who take movement seriously. Varied terrain. Objects with multiple uses. Unstructured time built into the programming alongside structured skill development. An explicit cultural permission to explore, to fail, to try things badly on the way to trying them well. A community that gathers around the doing rather than around the results.
It is a place where physical literacy is the aim and fitness is the byproduct, rather than the other way around. Where the measure of success is not what people look like when they leave but whether they come back, not because they feel they have to, but because they genuinely want to.
The best movement spaces in the world already look like this. Climbing gyms that build genuine community around problems on the wall. Martial arts schools where beginners and veterans train together without hierarchy of aesthetics. Parkour communities where the environment is the teacher and the practitioner’s job is simply to pay attention.
The technology, the science, and the social need are all pointing in the same direction. The question is whether the fitness industry has the cultural courage to follow.
Adults never lose the capacity for play, but they do often lose the access. They love permission, in a sense. Giving it back to them, without apology and without condescension, may be the most important thing a movement educator or gym owner can do.
And it was always the most important thing: we just forgot.