I always found the system of public gyms for fitness kinda odd. A place, where you go to get fat out of your system, which you’ve knowingly put there by eating more than you need. And not only are you trying to get rid of this energy, this process takes even more energy (electricity) and they charge you for it. So you go to a place, where you consume energy to remove energy, you’ve consumed earlier. And you pay for that. What a silly concept.

Talking to the Founders of changers.com last month I saw a better idea. Their solar module isn’t only charging your phone or your laptop battery, it is also tracking the amount of energy you are saving society from producing as credits. Where there is a direct exchange rate of credits you receive to energy, you’ve produced. This credit is hold in an online account then where you exchange it on their marketplace for other goods and services - it becomes a currency. A currency based on energy you produce for society. A fascinating concepts.

And that got me thinking. Instead of putting energy into the spinning and exercise machine, almost all of them at some point go through one motion of which you - technically - could extract energy. And treadmills which use the energy produced by the runner as their power source already exist. Same for bikes. So it should actually be possible to make a completely passive running Gym.

And taking this whole idea further, the number one energy sucker in Gyms is the Air Conditioning. Because most of the energy those humans get rid of actually is change into heat. And that heat piles up. But instead of cooling it down, you could again use it either heat other places or to produce electricity. Meaning you could create a Gym that isn’t only running by itself but actually produces energy, it could sell.

Now think of what this means. This Gym would actually have a great incentive to pay you to go there. Just think about that for a second. A gym you go to, which is tracking the amount of energy you are producing and pays you depending on how much you created. Not only would you win back at least parts of that way too much food you’ve put into yourself in the beginning of the circle, those body builders would actually be tracked by the actual energy they are producing.

They get a shirt at the end of the year by their gym stating the exact amount of energy they’ve produced for this gym that year. And not the visible muscle would be accounted for - we know those are not actually very efficient - but this number, representing the good you’ve done for society would be the thing to be proud of. How awesome would that be.