Seventy-seven-year-old Jo Goson grunts and puffs as she sits on the exercise machine and pumps away with her legs.
She has emphysema and the workout helps her breathe more easily by strengthening her lungs and the muscles on which breathing depends.
"It makes me fit. I was not well," she says.
A few metres away at the re-opened Chifley Community Gym, Nicole Hogan explains how the specialist equipment helps her deal with a very rare condition which affects her brain so that her memory and balance are impaired.
"I need to go to the gym to help with my brain as well as my body," she says.
Physical exercise helps mental health is the message from both the ladies - and from everybody else involved with the renewed gym which was shut and then reopened after the ACT government stumped up $473,000.
One of the prime political movers was Minister Chris Steel who had family experience of the benefits of exercise: his father used the gym as he recovered from brain cancer.
"He was referred by his doctor and he came to the Chifley gym," the minister said. His father, Phil, is now handing out voting cards for the upcoming election.
Exercise obviously can't cure cancer but it does help people strengthen muscles which have been debilitated by physical injury (including the inevitable injuries of age).
The Y Chifley Health and Wellness Centre (as it was then called) closed earlier in the year when the YMCA which ran it decided the costs were too high for a not-for-profit organisation.
The YMCA's machinery was removed and the new organisation, EQUIPD Allied Health, brought in new, state-of-the-art exercise machines, tailored for people who might not have the full range of movement. There are exercise machines for people in wheelchairs, for example.
When the YMCA pulled out, the gym's members got together and lobbied the ACT government. There was a public meeting where Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith was told straight that the gym improved health.
"We heard clearly from gym members, health professionals and the wider community how much they valued the services provided at the Chifley Health and Wellbeing Hub," she said.
Minister Steel said that the money was not a pre-election one-off. It would continue.
The result is the gym that feels utterly unlike the normal commercial gyms full of glistening bodies.
The Chifley gym is full of bodies - beautiful, still defying age when age has the sharpest of teeth.
Jorge Garcia was one of the prime movers in the political campaign to get the gym reopened. He exercises with his wife who has Parkinson's disease.
He works the dumbbells and what he calls "the pull down machine" to help ease his back pain. "For me it's just general wellbeing but my wife has got Parkinson's and what's good for her is good for me."
"This place is not a normal gym. Most of our members are over 50," he said. But he would welcome younger people.
The usual cost of using the facilities is $22 a week, according to Dylan Grubb, the director who runs it and who as an accredited exercise physiologist helps its users tailor routines to their needs. Some people had been given access at no or little cost.
He said the reopening was a "testament to the power of community advocacy".
"Following the previous operator's closure, the community voiced deep concerns about losing these essential services," he said.
"Clinical services will extend to the provision of a new clinical treatment room and testing equipment, and exercise and resistance training equipment for National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and Department of Veteran Affairs (DVA) community members," the ACT government said.
Nicole Hogan's condition means the cost of using facilities at the centre are met by the NDIS. She is grateful: ""It helps me to strengthen and my coordination. It helps me to concentrate. The staff are so good and supportive.
"It's the best thing ever. Rather than just going to the gym, this is a community."
