A Class of Street Workout in Hong Kong

Wheezing from noses, sweat drops falling along the lines of mandibles, faces becoming red and hot, a group of young people with tight sport wears are rolling and “flying” up and down around the bars with intensive body movements. They are “street workers”. Instead of doing exercise in gym rooms, more and more Hong Kong people are movin outside to public parks and make use of the facilities there. As this activity is gaining more popularity locally, an increasing number of specific training classes are held by professional street workout coaches.

Mo Ho Yin (the first on the right), a 23-year-old street workout coach in Hong Kong, is giving a class to his students at Mei Foo Park on 21 April morning.

The morning class starts at 11:30 am with students running around the park as their first warm-up exercise to prevent injury during training. Normally they would run around 1km in 4 minutes.

After running, students gather at the training field to do some stretching for further warm-up. According to Mo, stretching is essential to keep the muscles flexible, strong and healthy to allow a range of motion in the joints.

Mo is tutoring students to practice “planche” to strengthen their core abdominal muscles. Planche is among the most basic street workout routine, along with other exercise such as push-up, pull-up, squats and so on.

Between different sections of training, there are usually short breaks lasting one or two minutes. Although the temperature is almost 30 degree, students are still having fun during the break and the class is often filled with laughters.

Mo always brings his Bluetooth speaker in class to play music, so students can follow the rhythm to move. During formal street workout competitions, participates also can choose their own background music for performance.

One student hurt his hand during his work and Mo is trying to help him fix it by stretching his arm and hand. Students join workout classes with different goals, including reducing fat, developing fitness and relieving stress from work.

During the break, one girl complained about the heat and covered her head with a tower to stay away from the sun. She is among the 4 girls in the class, which have 12 students in total. According to Mo, although intuitively, this activity is more appealing to guys, the number of female students are increasing now.

The morning class ends at 1pm in the afternoon. The training field for students is soon turned into the playground for children and the elderly to relax.

The evening class starts at 6:30pm, which mostly consists of male students. Instead of the basic stamina training, they focus more on the exercise with horizontal bars, which is closer to the performance in competitions.

Students are doing push-up in pairs, which is for improving muscles of upper limbs and pectoralis major.

Mo’s 5-year experience of being a street workout athlete makes his hands rough with callus.

Students are exhausted after intensive one-hour training and are drinking plenty of water before leaving.

“Street workout is new in Hong Kong because it is a very new phrase for Hong Kong people,” said Mo, “I am one of the earliest people to focus on this sport as profession, but actually people are doing it without awareness. Even you are just simply pulling yourself on bars, you are doing street workout! You just don’t know it has a name and it’s my responsibility to let you know.”