A **gym** (from Ancient Greek //gymnásion//, "place to be naked") is nominally a facility in which humans voluntarily load their own [[skeletal muscle]] to provoke [[hypertrophy]] and increased strength via [[adaptive overcompensation]].

This mechanism is named [[Progressive Overload | progressive overload]], a rare gift-offering from biology. Sometimes, however, users' consistency is gated by [[akrasia]]. Additionally, many users are [[wrong]] and not effectively optimizing for the claimed desired outcome. This is common to many human endeavours.

> The real purpose of gyms is to convert people's New Year's Resolutions and expensive city-centre real estate into idle subscriptions.
> — [[gollark]]