Facilities We Equip

The Facility Types We Design, Equip and Service

Fit Supply designs, supplies and installs commercial fitness facilities nationwide. The requirements change completely from one facility type to the next, so we specify by facility rather than from a single catalog.

An unstaffed apartment gym open around the clock, a fire station room used by rotating shifts, a rehabilitation clinic where a therapist needs resistance to start near zero, and a campus recreation center absorbing a thousand students a day are four different engineering problems. Treating them as one is how a fitness room ends up unused, unsafe, or failed inside a year.

What changes from one facility type to the next

The equipment catalog is the least of it. Four things move when the facility type changes — who uses the room, whether anyone is supervising, what the structure underneath will carry, and how many people arrive at once — and each of them can rule out a specification that looked fine on paper. These are the questions we work through before an equipment list exists, on every project — nationwide, and most often in Texas and Arizona where our locations are.

Whether anyone is watching the room

This is the single biggest divider. An apartment amenity room, a hotel gym, an HOA community room and a student housing fitness room are typically unstaffed and open around the clock; a health club, a campus recreation center and a rehabilitation clinic are supervised. With nobody present to spot, correct form or clear a jam, the specification narrows toward equipment that is safe to use alone and hard to misuse — and the ADA clearances matter more, not less, because in a staffed room an obstruction gets moved and in an unstaffed one it stays there. ADA requires at least one of each TYPE of exercise machine to have a 30 by 48 in clear floor space served by an accessible route.

What the floor will carry

IBC Table 1607.1 designs fitness areas for a 100 psf live load, against 40 psf for residential areas outside sleeping rooms and 30 psf for sleeping areas, and live loads over 100 psf may not be reduced. That gap is why a hotel converting a guest room, a multifamily developer placing an amenity room on an upper floor, and an employer carving a gym out of office space are all asking their structural engineer the same question before they ask us anything. On a purpose-built recreation center or a slab-on-grade facility it rarely comes up at all.

How many people arrive at the same time

ACSM allows 25 to 50 sq ft per station on the fitness floor, which sets the honest piece count for a given room — but the useful number is the peak, not the average, and the peak shape differs completely by facility type. A corporate wellness center concentrates before work, at lunch and immediately after. Student housing loads into a narrow evening window. A fire or police station is used across every shift, so the room never really recovers. Duplicating the two or three pieces that actually queue usually serves a fixed budget better than adding another category.

Who the users are, and what they need to be able to do

A senior living community, a rehabilitation clinic and a YMCA branch serve a far wider range of ages and abilities than a boutique studio does, and that is a selection decision rather than a category of equipment added at the end. ASTM F3021 is the standard specification for universal design of fitness equipment for inclusive use by people with functional limitations and impairments, and it covers the machines themselves — step-through access, grip points, seat height. The ADA clearances govern the space around them: a 36 in minimum clear route width and a 60 in diameter turning space where circulation is tight.

And the floor is specified by zone, not by room

ASTM F2772 is the standard specification for the athletic performance properties of indoor sports floor systems, covering force reduction, vertical deformation, ball bounce and surface friction as MEASURED properties. A free-weight drop area, a turf lane, a group studio and a cardio row want different values from the build-up, which is why one specification across a whole facility usually overspends in one zone and underperforms in another. In multifamily and hospitality it is also a noise decision, because somebody is living or sleeping on the other side of that slab.