Intelligent Oxygen-Enriched and “Sterilized” Underground Gyms: Background, Dilemmas and Pathways

The in-depth integration of healthy China with national fitness and the hope to achieve the long-term goal of “leading Sports Nation” by 2035, can’t be realized without gyms where people do physical exercise. The international academic community recognizes that the 21st century is the golden time for sustainable and quality development. Taking a national perspective, authors of this paper studied the feasibility of building underground gyms in China through the approach of interdisciplinary research, as well as its dilemmas and pathways, and found out that quality development of underground space can effectively address challenges for large cities in China by increasing the resilience of urban area, and give full engage to underground capacity in striving for the goal of carbon peak and carbon neutrality. Underground gyms can also be incorporated into resident’s 15-min fitness circle, satisfying people’s needs of doing exercise at any time and in an easily-accessible place. However, China’s underground area development has been hindered by unclear property rights, chaotic action and utilization, and relatively backward laws and regulations. Moreover, building underground gyms still has to solve many problems such as poor air quality, severe sweat smell, and excessive bacteria and viruses. It is suggested that the capable authorities shall first clarify laws and regulations over place compound utilization, property rights and fire protection to facilitate the process of building underground gyms; encourage fitness practitioners to explore underground areas as gyms, and transfer their ground business to underground; then produce an intelligent and systematic solution of air quality improvement featuring oxygen-enrichment and “sterilization” with integration, a variety of instruments to monitor air quality of indoor gyms in real-time, to realize automatic control and management, and truly create worry-free and oxygen-enriched underground gyms with no sweat smell and no fear of bacteria and viruses.