Commercial Gym Equipment Buying Guide: The Full Floor Checklist

Your choice of commercial gym equipment will make or break your facility. Your members may appreciate the décor and quality of changing room facilities, but the reason they come is to train.

Unless you provide them with the best gear on which to do that, they won’t be coming back.

Some gyms can easily be tempted to purchase used equipment to cut costs. After all, they may reason that "a weight is a weight", whether it’s brand new or 10 years old, it will do the same job.

While that may be true, it’s missing the point.

Used gear gives a bad first impression, especially if you are a relatively new facility. And when that used gear starts to break down, your members will vote with their feet.

In this article, we present the 4 essential areas of commercial gym equipment you need to cover to meet the varied needs of your clientele.

Treat this page as the general checklist, the baseline floor that serves a mid-sized commercial gym. If you are outfitting a narrower space, we also have shorter lists for a hotel or resort fitness suite, a boutique fitness studio floor, a school or university gym, and a community fitness center.

Use the full checklist below for a ground up build, then use those guides to set priorities when square footage is tight.

Essential #1: Free Weights

You will want to provide a dedicated area to cater to your hardcore bodybuilding and powerlifting clientele. At a minimum, it should provide the following:

• Squat racks x 2
• Power Cage x 2
• Olympic Bench Press Station x 3
• Deadlift platform/area x 1
• Angled Leg Press x 2

Buyers often ask whether a squat rack, a power cage, or a Smith machine belongs in that footprint, and the honest answer depends on how supervised your floor is. Our breakdown of a Smith machine versus a power rack walks through which one earns its space in a staffed commercial gym.

You will want to equip this area with plenty of Olympic plates to allow your members to go heavy without skipping around for extra poundage. Make sure you’ve got a full complement of 45 lb., 35 lb., 25 lb., 10 lb., 5 lb., and 2.5 lb. plates.

We suggest a minimum of twelve of each.

You should also have an area which is dedicated to standard weights. This is where your members will perform their conventional bodybuilding-type exercises.

If you want a movement by movement sanity check on the barbells, benches, and dumbbells that cover every muscle group, our guide to the must have weight training equipment for every muscle in your body is a useful cross reference. Here’s what you’ll need in this area:

• 3 to 4 flat benches
• 3 adjustable benches
• A preacher curl bench
• A seated shoulder press bench with supports
• Two pull-up bars
• A t-bar rowing unit
• A rack (preferably two) featuring fixed-weight 5-foot long barbells ranging from 15 to 90 pounds
• Two complete sets of hexagonal rubber dumbbells, ranging from 2 pounds up to 150 pounds (you’ll only need one set from 100 to 150 lb.)
• A set of kettlebells ranging from 4 lb. to 40 lb., in 2 pound increments

Essential #2: Selectorized and Cable Machines

Aside from the free weights already described, your members will expect a useful mix of selectorized and cable machines on the gym floor.

Commercial gym equipment is warranted based on the type of facility that it will be used in. So, purchase gear rated for full commercial gym use instead of light commercial.

Here’s what you should consider for a mid-sized gym’s selectorized and cable zone:

• Cable Cross-over Machine x 1
• Vertical Chest Press x 1
• Shoulder Press x 1
• Pec Deck Machine x 1
• Bicep Curl machine x 1
• Tricep extension Machine x 1
• Lat Pulldown x 2
• Ab Crunch / Lower Back Machine x 1
• Leg Extension x 2
• Standing Leg Curl x 1
• Prone Leg Curl x 1
• Seated Calf Raise x 1
• Standing Calf Raise x 1

Here are nine construction and usability details to check on selectorized and cable machines:

1. Don’t buy anything below precision welded full commercial 2 x 4 11-gauge high tensile steel frames
2. Look for gear that includes easy instruction placards displayed
3. Weight stack enclosures should be made of 16-gauge steel with a powder-coated finish
4. Heavy-grade upholstery that is top stitched
5. Fiberglass reinforced nylon pulleys that are precision matched to a specific cable diameter
6. Range of Motion adjustments
7. Angled footplates and hand grips
8. Nonslip rubber hand grips
9. Rubber feet to protect the floor

Essential #3: Cardio Equipment

Your cardio equipment area is what most non bodybuilding type members will check out first. They’ll expect plenty of gleaming, shiny equipment, LED screens, and running tracks.

Here’s what a medium-sized gym should contain:

• 8 to 10 treadmills
• 6 to 8 upright bikes
• 3 to 4 recumbent bikes
• 3 to 4 elliptical trainers

Ideally, you should also have a dedicated spin cycle area where you run cycle classes. You should equip this area with as many as two dozen spin cycles to cater to the demand which will be sure to follow.

Regarding exercise bikes, there are a huge array of commercial options in the marketplace. Here are some tips to help you wade through them.

• Resistance type: the bike's resistance determines its potential benefit for the user. The options are direct tension, air resistance, or magnetic resistance. Magnetic resistance is the most durable and fluid.
• Frame: the bike should allow for the adjustability of the seat (both vertically and horizontally) and the handlebars. Yet, it should do so without compromising the integrity of the framing.
• Display: the LED display should show a minimum of speed, distance, time, calories, and pulse. Many commercial machines are notoriously inaccurate regarding calories and pulse, so spend the time to find the most accurate, and your members will notice it.
• Programs: the more training options you provide your members, the more satisfied they’ll be.

Essential #4: Miscellaneous Extras

You have now equipped your gym with the major pieces of equipment that your members will expect and that they need to have a rewarding training experience. But you’re not finished yet.

Your goal shouldn’t be to meet the expectations of your members: it should be to exceed them.

In this section, we consider several extra options that will lift your facility beyond the run of the mill.

• Plyometric boxes: plyo boxes allow your members to get vertical with box jumps. These can be incorporated into a CrossFit type workout, used as part of a circuit, or done as a stand alone cardio move. You should have 2 sets of three plyo boxes in differing sizes. Ensure the sides are covered so they do not scrape people’s shins when used.
• Suspension Trainers: a suspension trainer provides a unique workout option that utilizes gravity and is extremely core-centric. They are low cost and take up virtually no room at all. Investing in 4 or 5 sets will pay big dividends. You may even decide to hold suspension training classes.
• Resistance bands: resistance bands are another low-cost, low-space requirement addition that many members will appreciate. Bands allow members to perform resistance moves that simulate sports actions and complement their barbell and dumbbell work. Most bands are color-coded according to the resistance. Supplying your members with a full color-coded set will be sufficient.
• Foam Rollers: foam rollers allow your members to perform instant myofascial release or deep tissue massage. This provides a great warm-up and allows the trainer to attack any nasty pressure point they may be experiencing. Have about a half dozen foam rollers available, and have your instructors train members how to get the best out of them.
• Battle ropes: battle rope training has become a fixture on commercial floors, so you want your facility to be on top of it. Battle ropes provide a dual-force dynamic effect that helps to reduce injuries and improve the physiological response of the trainer. They also increase mobility, stability, and proprioceptive awareness.

The Station Count Rule: Sizing a Floor by Peak Users, Not by Membership

Most floor plans start from the membership number, and that is the wrong number to start from. A member who trains at six in the morning never competes for a bench with the member who trains at seven at night, so the only figure that decides how many stations you need is the count of people standing on the floor together during your busiest hour.

Here is the calculation we use when we size a build, written out in plain text so you can run it on your own numbers:

• peak concurrent users = total members x peak hour attendance rate
• stations per area = (peak concurrent users x share of users training that area) / users a station serves per hour

Every input below is an assumption we are stating out loud rather than a measured figure. We assume a peak hour attendance rate of 5 percent of the membership.

We assume the share of peak users in each area roughly follows the equipment mix recommended earlier in this article. We assume a rack or bench station serves 4 users per hour because lifters work in with each other between sets, and that a cardio machine serves 1.5 users per hour because one person holds it for a full session plus a wipe down.

Those are WorkoutHealthy planning assumptions drawn from the checklist above rather than industry research, and you should replace every one of them with your own door counts the moment you have them.

Here is the worked example on round numbers. A gym with 2,000 members and an assumed 5 percent peak attendance rate has 100 concurrent users in the busy hour.

Assume that group splits 30 percent free weights, 35 percent cardio, 25 percent selectorized and cable, and 10 percent extras and open floor.

• Free weights: 100 x 0.30 = 30 users, then 30 / 4 users per station per hour = 7.5, which rounds up to 8 stations. The free weight list earlier in this article comes to 2 squat racks, 2 power cages, 3 Olympic bench stations, and 1 deadlift platform, which is 8.
• Cardio: 100 x 0.35 = 35 users, then 35 / 1.5 users per machine per hour = 23.3, which rounds up to 24 machines. The cardio list earlier in this article runs 20 to 26 units before you add the spin room.

The selectorized zone deliberately uses a different sizing rule because one member cycles through six or eight different machines in a single session instead of queueing for one. Size that zone for exercise coverage instead, which is what the machine list above is already doing.

Change one assumption and the answer moves quickly. A membership that skews toward powerlifting might justify a 45 percent free weight share instead of 30, which turns the same 100 peak users into 45 free weight users and 12 stations rather than 8, while pulling the cardio count down at the same time.

Raise the peak attendance assumption from 5 percent to 8 percent and every count in the plan grows by more than half.

Treat all of it as a WorkoutHealthy planning estimate rather than an industry standard. We have not measured attendance rates across facilities and we are not presenting these percentages as survey data, they are a starting frame for a conversation about square footage that you then correct with what your own door counter tells you.

Conclusion

Equipping your gym will be the biggest investment in your business that you will make. It will also be a major determining factor in the success of your enterprise.

You want to equip your floor space with a full complement of Olympic and conventional free weights, selectorized and cable machines, cardiovascular training equipment, and impressive extras that will look great and be highly functional for your members.

WorkoutHealthy has supplied commercial strength and cardio equipment to gyms, hotels, schools, and municipal facilities since 2009. A single quote covering the whole floor is usually cheaper than piecing the build together station by station.