Butte-Silver Bow has a $50,000 head start on funding an outdoor fitness court that county officials would like to locate at Chester Steele Park near the hospital or another Uptown park.
“We have so much down at Stodden (Park) and we’re just kind of running out of room there,” said Parks Director Shawn Fredrickson. “There’s a lot of people that live Uptown, and we need to start focusing on a little bit more recreation opportunities Uptown and not just have everything at Stodden.”
The National Fitness Campaign awarded a $50,000 grant to the Butte-Silver Bow Parks Department to help fund a “Fitness Court” in partnership with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Montana, but there are strings attached.
For one, it will take another $148,000 in local funds to pay for the project. Fredrickson will seek private donations for the money and the Fitness Campaign will assist those efforts, but “that’s going to take some work,” he said
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Some local concrete work will be required, too, and the Council of Commissioners would need to formally accept the grant before the $50,000 comes through.
“But I think we can make it happen and I think it’s a really cool thing just by looking at the photos,” Fredrickson told The Montana Standard. “By all accounts, they’ve done 500 of them.”
The National Fitness Campaign is a San Francisco-based organization of builders, designers, consultants and sponsors that promote wellness initiatives and help communities build a trademark Fitness Court, which the organization calls “the world’s best outdoor gym.”
The Fitness Court is free to use and is designed to provide a full-body workout in only seven minutes in an outdoor setting. People can rotate through seven zones: core, squat, push, lunge, pull, agility and bend.
The outdoor courts are 40 feet by 40 feet and have raised boxes and platforms at various heights, pullup bars, rings and floor space for agility exercises.
The number of Fitness Courts in the U.S. reached 500 last year and it will grow to nearly 600 by the end of this year, said Lindsay Valenti, communications manager for the Fitness Campaign.
There are no Fitness Courts in Montana yet but Sidney and Glasgow also received conditional grants recently. They are the first three cities in Montana to get them.
The courts are quite popular with people of all ages 14 and up, Valenti said.
“We have active groups in their 60s and 70s who gather at the Fitness Court and do stretching and some of the easier modifications to hardcore enthusiasts who work out solo every day,” she said. “They use it as part of their walking trails or full-body workouts.
“It’s been great to see,” she said. “We have a veterans group in Charlotte, North Carolina, that every Wednesday, at 6 in the morning, they have a Wednesday workout.”
Mike Smith is a reporter at the Montana Standard with an emphasis on government and politics.
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