The design of your fitness center, gym, or personal training studio plays a significant role in the guest experience you provide for your clients. While it’s a lot easier to get it right the first time, this isn’t always possible, as things can be unpredictable. Regularly re-assessing your gym design to see where any potential bottlenecks or other inefficiencies might be can help you keep your gym’s layout for optimal use.

Building the floor plan of your gym or fitness center for a smooth flow can be a tricky thing to do, but it’s essential for improving your guest experience. While functionality is your primary concern, your fitness center should be aesthetically pleasing as well. Fine-tuning your gym's interior design is also a key component of keeping your layout optimal, no matter what the workout trends are. Here are some tips for improving the layout of your fitness center.

Assess the Situation

On paper, your design layout may seem to make perfect sense but things are often different in practice. Many fitness centers cater to different demographics and styles of fitness. A cross-fit gym design should have a different layout than a weight training facility, for example. Figure out what your guests want out of your gym. Whether it’s circuit training, strength training or a focus on aerobics and group classes, different needs require different fitness center layouts.

Regarding the design, keeping track of what’s working and what isn’t can guide your decision making for your next shuffle. Get your employees to create logs throughout the day on how busy the gym design is, while making notes on any room for improvement. Customer feedback is also incredibly valuable. At the end of the day, their satisfaction is what’s going to keep them coming through your doors.

Meet the Demand

A poor design layout often isn’t the biggest issue when the gym isn’t busy; the real test is what happens during peak hours. Take a look at your fitness center during a busy rush to see where your biggest bottlenecks are. This could mean reconfiguring some particular types of equipment, on top of adjusting the fitness center/s overall floor plan.

Having consistently long lineups may be useful if you’re a restaurant, but there are no advantages to your guests getting frustrated because they have to wait twenty minutes every time they want to use the squat rack. This may be a make or break situation for people trying out your gym before they get a membership. If you’re concerned about converting your drop-ins to members, this is going to make a sizeable difference.

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Improve the Flow

There are so many gym workouts out there to keep track of but with different fitness trends come different exercise behaviors and easy to use patterns. You’ll see that some gym or fitness center layouts will be more conducive to your current guests’ behavior. Most gyms are already set up in a way where cardio fitness equipment, free weights, machines, classes and stretching areas are grouped together and separated but the arrangement of these groupings can make a big difference. Try to design the average gym guest’s typical workout experience, from the moment they leave the change room. Going through this motion can bring to light inefficiencies in your gym layout that you can improve on.

Make it Look Good

While functionality is the primary concern for a fitness center, a sloppy looking gym design isn’t good for business. For the modern gym fitness center, inspiration is huge factor in success and overall motivation of your clientele and making your fitness center social media ready can make a significant impact on your marketing efforts. A clean space is conducive to less chaos, more mindfulness, and will lead to less guest frustration. Ensure your staff regularly cleans fitness equipment and clears the gym of anything unneeded, always making sure it’s tidy, presentable, and easy to use for your guests.

Fine-Tune

As with all design improvements you make to your gym or fitness center or personal training studio, you’ll want to track the results to see whether your adjustments had the intended effect. You may find that fixing one problem may have caused an issue elsewhere. This constant readjustment is great for optimizing your perfect setup and, once you find it, you’ll just need to make small tweaks here and there. Fitness trends can also change throughout the years, meaning that one design that worked in the past may no longer work in the future.