During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Istanbul’s multiethnic and multiconfessional denizens developed a common sports culture in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This culture centered around the belief that the regular performance of physical exercise, gymnastics, and team sports, namely soccer, was the most effective means to forming robust young men, modern communities, and a civilized empire. As a result, both shared civic and exclusive ethno-religious bonds undergirded sports during the period. This paper investigates the dialectic relationship between these bonds in order to highlight the similar (and dissimilar) ways in which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Istanbulites engaged sports as a means to simultaneously breakdown “traditional” and reinscribe new communal boundaries. Specifically, it analyzes the institutional and discursive trajectory of Muslim, Jewish, Armenian, and Greek sports clubs and the competitions and exhibitions that they organized from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War. Established along ethnic and confessional lines, sports clubs were spaces where young men built ethnic-based solidarity and experimented with new ideas about the self, body, gender, and community while they trained their bodies, lifted weights, competed, as well as socialized, read books, and attended conferences. While these ideas were worked out in clubs, athletic competitions and gymnastics exhibitions in newly constructed venues around the city, such as gardens, theatres, and outdoor stadiums, served as more public forums from which Turkish and Jewish members, administrators, as well as non-affiliated supporters of fitness clubs performed, displayed, and reconfigured the building blocks and boundaries of the community. Drawing from a diverse array of multilingual unpublished reports, surveys, newspapers, government reports, and vernacular photographs, this paper builds on a growing body of literature on communal identities, popular culture, and leisure in the broader Middle East. The paper is part of a broader book manuscript project, which examines the refashioning of communal boundaries in late Ottoman Istanbul.