Free outdoor workout locations in Budapest

When you hear about street workout for the first time, you might think that it sound like street food: it’s a fancy new expression for something that has existed for years. What’s so cool about exercising on the street? Well, index.hu looked into the situation in Budapest.

They were surprised to find out that Budapest is actually quite abundant in outdoor fitness parks, which are also quite modern. Most of them are one or two years old, you can only see weedy areas or concrete blocks when you try to find them with Google Street View.

They started spreading recently and now there are plenty of them. But what are they exactly? Well, we could call them adult playgrounds, in other words, outdoor venues where you can work out.

It’s hard to define what this actually means because every location, every producer, every equipment is different. In favour of simplicity, Index divided these locations into two groups:

• A part of them have static equipment (benches, rails, poles, horizontal and vertical ladders, push-up stands, balance beams, flying rings, ropes etc.). These are the street workout parks or exercise tracks in a traditional sense. Practically, special parkour tracks, like the one in Városmajor for example, also belong here.
• The other part have dynamic machines with moving components (tread machines, elliptical walkers, rowing benches, waist movers, pectoral muscle workers etc.), which are like the ones you find in a gym, but in a simpler and hard-wearing design. These are the outdoor gyms or fitness parks.

Naturally the definitions are quite arbitrary: everyone interprets them differently or use them as synonyms, in fact, the different types of equipment are usually mixed in most places. Even though there are some data bases of Budapest locations on the internet, index.hu decided to create their own, profound collection.

First of all, they looked up all municipalities in Budapest and asked about how many and what type of fitness parks the districts have. 17 districts replied, and they also got some addresses about the ones maintained by the capital. Then they visited as much as they could and transferred the locations onto a map. They were surprised to see how much these places cover the whole of Budapest.