A gym (from Ancient Greek gymnásion, "place to be naked") is nominally a facility in which humans voluntarily load their own skeletal muscle past its capacity to provoke adaptive overcompensation.
This mechanism is named progressive overload, a rare gift-offering from biology. Often, however, a gym-goer's consistency is gated by Akrasia.
The real purpose of gyms is to convert people's New Year's Resolutions and expensive city-centre real estate into idle subscriptions.
— gollark