The Gym, for grown-ups
44 workouts, 70 moves and 28 games for children from preschool to 8th grade. Free, no account needed, no adverts, and nothing about your child is sent anywhere — their times and their own bests are kept in their browser and nowhere else.
How much should a child move?
The 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans ask for 60 minutes or more a day of moderate-to-vigorous activity for 6-to-17-year-olds, and ask that muscle-strengthening and bone-strengthening activity each happen on at least three days a week as part of those 60 minutes. For 3-to-5-year-olds the advice is less precise and more generous: active throughout the day, at any intensity, with a reasonable target of about three hours of it.
Most children do not get there. The 2024 United States Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth put 20–28% of 6-to-17-year-olds at the 60-minute mark and gave the country a D−; a federal survey over 2023–24 put it near 20%. It falls sharply with age. Short bits count, and a child who moves for ten minutes three times has done thirty minutes.
Is this safe?
The things that make youth training risky are well known: no supervision, equipment that can fall on a child, and adding load before the movement is right. The NSCA's position statement on youth resistance training is blunt about the first — without qualified supervision, age-appropriate equipment and a safe environment, children should not do resistance exercise at all. A tablet cannot supervise. So the Gym is built around that limitation rather than pretending it away:
- There is no barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, weight plate, bench or bar in it. Not as an option, not even listed: the word does not appear in the data, so nobody writing a future workout can reach for one.
- Load is a ball, a towel, or a backpack with a book or two, from 3rd grade, and never described as a number of pounds. The lifting shapes are the real ones — squat, front squat, press, deadlift — so a child who grows into a real gym arrives with them already right. That is the most useful thing this section can do for them.
- Nothing overhead with anything in the hands below 4th grade, and nothing where the head takes weight at any age. No headstands, no neck bridges.
- The youngest two levels get no clock to race. Level 1 has no timer and no score at all. CrossFit's own youth guidance allows five to seven years of foundation before intensity matters much, and that is a judgement a coach in the room can make and a screen cannot.
- Every jumping workout teaches landing first. Landing — soft knees, knees out, feet flat — is the thing most worth coaching carefully, and a jumping workout without it in its warm-up is refused by our own tests.
- Every workout page carries the five stop signals, read aloud before any clock starts: dizzy, chest hurts, can't catch your breath, a sharp pain in one spot, feeling sick. Stop and get a grown-up.
- No camera, no pose detection, no heart-rate device, no leaderboard, and no photographs of children. Not deferred — refused.
None of that makes injury impossible, and nothing on a screen replaces you being nearby. For the youngest two levels, and for anything that leaves the ground at any age, please be in the room.
Why we never mention weight
A children's fitness section is the likeliest place on a kids' site to plant a lasting worry about food and bodies. So this one does not talk about weight, shape, size, calories or eating less — at all, anywhere a child reads. About sixty words are refused in the code itself, not merely avoided by whoever is writing, and the test fails the build if one appears.
Everything worth saying can be said another way: strong, fast, springy, steady, bendy; your heart gets stronger; your bones get stronger; you can play for longer. Food belongs to the Kitchen, where it is a thing you make and eat and enjoy, and the Gym's whole nutrition content is one lesson saying food is fuel.
The four levels
| Level | Grades | Ages | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sprouts | Preschool–K | 4 to 6 | Play with a name. No clock, no score, lots of animals. |
| Movers | 1st–3rd | 6 to 9 | Two or three moves in a round, and a clock you can ignore. |
| Climbers | 4th–6th | 9 to 12 | Real rounds, a score on your own device, and your own best to beat. |
| Athletes | 7th–8th | 12 to 14 | Shapes under something light, and honest practice for a real gym later. |
Where the ideas come from
The way this section thinks about fitness — ten general physical skills, three ways to move, "do it right, do it right every time, then do it fast", and the rule that a session ends with a game — comes from CrossFit's published training model and its CrossFit Kids program. Peabody is not affiliated with CrossFit, and CrossFit® and CrossFit Kids® are their trademarks. We have taken the framework, which is ideas, and none of their text or their workout names.
We also part from them in five places, deliberately: no barbell (above); no weight-and-obesity framing, which their own materials use and we think belongs nowhere near a child's own body; no nutrition prescription; no competition between children and no leaderboard; and intensity arriving much later, because we cannot see your child.
Sources: the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans (2nd edition, 2018) and the CDC; the NSCA's Youth Resistance Training position statement; the 2024 US Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth; SHAPE America on PE and recess; and CrossFit's own published articles on what fitness is and how a kids' class is built. The whole plan, including where we disagree with each of them, is written down in the repository as docs/FITNESS-PLAN.md.
Questions
- Do I need a grown-up with me?
- For the youngest two levels, yes — somebody in the room. For anything that leaves the ground, yes, at any age. And for anything that involves stairs or a climbing frame, always.
- Is this safe for my child?
- The things that make youth training risky are no supervision, equipment that can fall on a child, and going heavy before the shape is right — so the Gym has no barbell, dumbbell, bench or bar at all, keeps load to a ball or a bag with a book or two from 3rd grade, and gives the youngest levels no clock to race. Every workout carries the five stop signals, and every jumping workout teaches landing first.
- Where do these ideas come from?
- The way this section thinks about fitness — ten skills, three ways to move, do it right before you do it fast, and end with a game — comes from CrossFit's published training model and its CrossFit Kids program. Peabody isn't affiliated with them, and the safety rules here are our own and in several places stricter.
- Why doesn't the Gym talk about weight?
- Because a fitness section is the likeliest place on a children's site to plant a lasting worry about food and bodies, and because it is not needed: everything worth saying can be said as strong, fast, springy, steady and bendy. The words are refused in the code, not just avoided by the writers.