Gym / Fitness centre

A gym / fitness centre: a place with exercise machines and/or fitness/dance classes. It's a place to go for exercise (to "work out" as they say in the US) Otherwise known as a health club, or fitness club

This page is about how to map a "fitness centre". As described below these things are actually more commonly called "gym", but here we are describing gym as in fitness centre not the other meaning of gym as in gymnasium.

What's the tag?

The answer to this question has evaded us for years, but happily we're starting to move towards some good options. Please read the following and make your choice.

leisure=fitness_centre has now been properly documented in English (not just German) and is probably the best of the top-level tag options.
leisure=sports_centre + sport=fitness (combined tags) is also a reasonable choice. Arguably the concept deserves its own top level tag. Some notes in relation to the usage stats: sport=fitness also gets used (perhaps correctly) on swimming pools and other such POIs; so not always a gym. And of course leisure=sports_centre is a more general tag, not denoting a gym/fitness centre directly, and so obviously it wins on the stats below, but that doesn't mean it's the right answer to this question.
~~amenity=gym~~ was for years the most popular top level tag gym/fitness centre POI. However this has been explicitly deprecated and documented as "do not use", because of some of the problems described below. Since then the tag has been overtaken by the above two options as people move away from using this bad tag.

A common tagging mistake is to use the US spelling (center), while OSM tries to consistently use British spelling for tag names (centre). Sadly people even make this mistake within tag proposal pages.

There are a number of wiki tag documentation pages and tag proposal pages.

Tag:leisure=fitness_centre - Strangely this documentation page was only made relative recently in English, but De:Tag:leisure=fitness_centre existed for a while.
Tag:~~amenity=gym~~ (Don't use) - The most popular tag for a while, but we're successfully moving away from this problematic tag
Proposed features/Gym - The original 2008 proposal page for amenity=gym
Proposed features/Fitness Center - 2012 proposal for amenity=fitness_center (note US spelling)
Proposed features/leisure=gym - 2014 proposal for leisure=gym, now cancelled
leisure=fitness_station - the tag for an "outdoors gym"

... however, every tag that has been suggested seems to be in actual use in the map, plus some combinations of them.

Taginfo

To illustrate how much of an inconsistent mess we have, here are the taginfo statistics for the different tags:

Not recommended

More details at taginfo

leisure not amenity

Most people seem to agree that 'leisure' would be better than 'amenity' as the key to use. The leisure tag is for places people go in their spare time, which is how most people use a gym. Also other tags like leisure=sports_centre, leisure=fitness_station or leisure=pitch all use it.

In general the amenity key was "overloaded" with tags in the early years of OpenStreetMap, and we have gradually moved various things off it. Moving tags comes with a cost. This is the only advantage of using the amenity key. It means we can stick with (and recommend) using the most commonly used tag. However amenity=gym is widely disliked for one other big reason (described below), and so many mappers are not sticking with it.

Ambiguity of the word gym

"Gym" has two meanings which are quite different (though from the same origins). From this ambiguity we might conclude that using the word gym in a tag is a bad idea.

For English speaking people in the UK, North America & Australia in modern times, the word "gym" has most often come to mean a place with exercise machines and/or fitness/dance classes. It's a place to go for exercise (to "work out" as they say in the US) Otherwise known as a health club, fitness club, or fitness centre For added confusion, the room where fitness/dance classes happen, might be called a gymnasium. So there's a gymnasium as part of the gym!	Obviously the origin of the word "gym" is "gymnasium", a large room which could be used for many different indoor sports. A place where you do gymnastics would probably be called a gymnasium, however the majority of gymnasiums in the world are actually part of Schools or sports centre, and typically these places are designed to cater for lots of different sports, with markings on the floor for playing indoor basketball, volleyball, badminton, 5-a-side soccer etc. For added confusion "Gymnasium" in German and Scandinavian languages is a type of secondary school. Weirdly this has crossed over to the U.S. in some places. Meanwhile in Latin languages an "academia" doesn't mean academy (type of school), but a fitness centre! (In ancient Greece, a gymnasium such as The Academy combined both physical and general education, different parts of Europe and its languages then adopted those words for either of the two uses).

From this ambiguity we might conclude that using the word gym in a tag is a bad idea. However...

Common use of the word gym (counterargument)

Native speakers very commonly use the word "gym" to describe a thing which is a gym/fitness centre. They very commonly say "Let's go to the gym" for example.

Oxford Dictionary

A place, typically a private club, providing a range of facilities designed to improve and maintain physical fitness and health.
— British English

A membership organization that provides a range of facilities designed to improve and maintain physical fitness and health
— US English

More examples: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gym

LEO Dictionary (German-English)

Uses gym for the workout example "to work out at a gym"

Wikipedia

A health club (also known as a fitness club, fitness center, and commonly referred to as a gym) is a place which houses exercise equipment for the purpose of physical exercise.

Health club on Wikipedia

German Wikipedia also references it that way: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gym (Fitnessstudio, im Englischen)

Google

Google Image Search is also very clear

Google Search:

"let's go to the gym" 7.270.000 results

"let's go to the health club" 8 results

"let's go to the fitness centre" 2 results

"let's go to the fitness center" 6 results

That doesn't necessarily mean that "fitness centre" is wrong, just that people prefer to use the word "gym" in that sentence. It rolls off the tongue more easily for colloquial use. People do not say "Let's go to the fitness centre".

Other "maps"

(searching for "gym map ... ")

We can conclude that most native English speakers know exactly what they're talking about when they say "gym". It's not normally ambiguous, and it does mean gym as in fitness centre.

... However "fitness centre" is "correct" and makes perfect sense to native English speakers too (though used less frequently in colloquial speech). Perhaps it can be regarded as more accurate precise language, and certainly avoids ambiguity.