How many of you make time for exercise and wellness in your busy lives? Nobody is judging, I promise.

Getting to the gym can feel like a huge accomplishment for so many of us. Establishing a routine is the next challenge.

Many of us are eager to be there, even if our schedules are not always compliant. But what awaits us once we reach the gym? For wheelchair users, a new level of frustration lurks behind its doors, and that is where I become judgmental.

Every time I enroll in a gym membership, a sinking feeling comes over me. I know I will pay the same fee as everyone else, but I can only use a small percentage of the equipment. The staff will hesitate to assist me with the equipment I can access out of fear and liability concerns. And the personal training, which comes at a juicy premium wherever you go, will not cater to me.

Gyms increasingly promise tailored personal training experiences and fun classes to justify substantial fees and compete with boutique studio chains. But the cost to exercise becomes altogether too steep when you know that you’ll only be enjoying a slim fraction of the actual offerings.

Four Hurdles to Using the Gym

I don’t go to the gym to languish in the time-out corner. Quite the opposite: I go there to move and to have a dynamic experience.

• The equipment itself is the first hurdle. I often need to put my work out on ice until I catch a fellow member who can grab a weight or a cable I can’t reach. Although I’ve been lucky enough to work out in friendly places where people are happy to lend a helping hand, we should not rely on our luck and personal charisma to finish our set. We need exercise equipment built according to universal design principles.
• The second issue is staff development. Personal trainers receive very limited training on adaptive exercise, if any. Basic education in kinesiology seems only to cover how certain kinds of bodies move. Not mine or most other bodies with disabilities. Personal training certification should require some level of adaptive training knowledge. A personal trainer and client relationship already requires a healthy dose of trust. I do not want to take a leap of faith straight into a set of exercises inappropriate for my level of injury.
• Overt ableism is another problem. It can manifest as a dismissive attitude, or its flipside: being patronized as a “hero” simply because you’re a person with a disability at the gym.
• Finally, wheelchair users have to pay yet another unofficial “disability tax.” We are forced to use personal trainers to get help with exercises that we could not perform purely unassisted (most of the time due to lack of accessible equipment). But the price is steep. Personal trainers are very expensive, and a very limited subset of the disability community can afford them.

We Deserve Gym Equity

Physical fitness is particularly important for our aspirations for independence and a high quality of life. If I don’t exercise, it makes my transfers more difficult and painful. Transports can hurt my shoulders and wrists when I am not in shape. A good workout can’t fix everything, but it can help lower the risk of soft tissue injuries and repetitive stress disorders.

Like with so many things, we must turn to fellow community members and DIY to get the job done right now. Thank God for the websites and social media influencers who focus on adaptive training. I rely on those to brainstorm ways I can hit certain muscle groups based on my level of injury.

However, we should not accommodate informal segregation due to a lack of accommodation for disabled bodies. Our workarounds should not remain the norm.

As a community, it’s time to talk about—and act on—plans for partnering with big fitness brands and companies on the more mom-and-pop side. Let’s get our people moving.