“Exercise is bunk,” Henry Ford famously opined. “If you are healthy you don’t need it. If you are sick you shouldn’t take it.”

Well, for those who hate spending hours in the gym, there’s now a compelling environmental reason for working on those love handles – generating electricity.

The city of Hull is playing host to the first outdoor gym converting people power into useable power, installed by The Great Outdoor Gym Company (TGO).

Electricity generated on the cross trainer and exercise bikes at the new Green Heart gym currently powers LED lighting for the site. But Georgie Delaney, creative director of TGO, told BusinessGreen the company is working with the National Housing Federation to identify a site where a gym could be hooked up to local buildings or feed electricity into the grid.

Each piece of equipment can produce between 50W and 400W of electricity, although the figure is likely to be closer to 100W for those users who are not Olympic rowers.

Delaney said the company was aiming to build up the number of electricity-generating gyms to meet a target of installing 100 new sites annually for the next five years. Considering each one serves a community of around 5,000 people, Delaney estimates there is potential to tap the renewable energy of around 2.5 million people, while helping them get fit.

“We would like to have [electricity] generating components in all our gyms, but it’s going to take a little bit of time to get to that point,” she said. “Hopefully, we can start next year.”

TGO is also looking for corporate sponsors and “has had some interest from an energy company”, Delaney added.

However, for the moment the company is concentrating on making a success of the Hull gym.

“The response has been really good,” Delaney said. “We deliberately put it into a site that is not in any way protected, and people have really understood what we’re trying to do.”