7 Tips for Maintaining Your Gym

7 Tips for Maintaining Your Gym

For gym owners, regular maintenance is critical for a multitude of reasons. Failure to consistently maintain equipment can lead to breakdowns, poor hygiene, and the need to hire expensive professional services. These occurrences not only incur high costs, but also have detrimental effects on a gym by reducing member retainment.

Therefore, it is immensely important that gym owners/managers have a comprehensive plan for maintenance to prevent such profit leaks. In this blog, we will go over seven practices to maintain gym equipment and facilities, helping gym owners guarantee lowered expenses and valuable member retention.

1. Clean Regularly

Keeping gym facilities clean can be split into two primary functions: overall hygiene and equipment performance. According to the IHRSA, gym cleanliness is one of the top factors in improving member retention. Customers who perceived their gym as clean had a 90% likelihood to renew their membership, compared to only 52% for those who perceived their facilities as unclean.

Maintaining hygiene is not only limited to what meets the eye, however. Not only should staff wipe down benches, barbells, and dumbbells, but cleaning procedures should also focus on machine parts. Over time, built up dust and dirt can result in rust on metal parts, significantly shortening equipment lifespan. It is thereby imperative that gyms enforce a strict schedule for cleanliness to prevent breakdowns and customer dissatisfaction.

2. Set up a maintenance schedule

One way to improve the time-consuming process of maintenance checks is to create a maintenance schedule. A maintenance schedule is a detailed timetable that plans specific upkeep tasks and responsibilities for each piece of equipment. This helps ensure that checks happen regularly and systematically, with continuously consistent tracking of tasks. For managers, this allows them to delegate responsibilities to their staff remotely and set concrete deadlines for timely facility inspections.

OnSight constructs maintenance schedules for gym facilities using our radar sensors and real-time machine usage data. The innovative technology makes it simple for gym owners to view equipment check-ups at a single glance through a comprehensive live dashboard.

3. Proper Usage

Proper equipment usage is often overlooked as a key factor for increasing machine lifespan. Despite regular maintenance and hygiene checks, shortened lifespans and even complete breakdowns can still occur due to members' misuse. Improper usage also poses notable safety concerns for individual customers and may even cause other members to leave their subscriptions.

To ensure members are using machines safely and correctly, gyms must prioritize providing clear instructions and regulations on equipment usage. Notes and diagrams that help clarify proper utilization can go a long way towards improving equipment lifespan while still being inclusive to all levels of fitness expertise.

4. Invest in High Quality Equipment

Although this may seem obvious, investing in high quality equipment is a very realistic and simple way of improving facility maintenance. Machines from commonly appraised brands like Rogue Fitness, Life Fitness, and Hammer Strength tend to have longer lifespans with higher durability. The higher quality of equipment may also lead to greater member satisfaction, which is essential for gyms to retain customers.

5. Call Professional Services (when necessary)

In the case that complete breakdowns do occur, gym owners should contact professional services immediately. Many may opt to push back on maintenance fixes due to high costs, but this will eventually lead to greater profit leaks in the long term. It is essential for gym owners to keep all their machines optimally functioning at all times, and even more necessary for fixes to happen with the utmost priority.

6. Monitor Equipment Usage

A key practice in gym maintenance is to regularly monitor usage rates. This procedure allows managers to understand what equipment is being used the most, which helps them know which machines to prioritize in maintaining. This also highlights which machines are not earning their floor space, leading to potential replacements and improved floor occupancy optimization.

One downside to monitoring equipment usage is its burdening time commitment. It takes immense effort for employees to constantly survey the gym and manually track which machines are being used. Additionally, confounding anecdotal evidence and random monitoring cycles makes it difficult to compile accurate aggregated data across time.

One way to mitigate this commitment is to reduce the frequency of manual checks, by employing a variety of maintenance technology. Both software and hardware upgrades can improve operational efficiency by notable margins.

7. Utilize Maintenance Technology

Employing highly advanced, analytical maintenance technology can make monitoring equipment usage significantly simpler. CMMS (computerized maintenance management systems) can help managers track facility usage without frequent manual inspections, reducing the time commitment.

At OnSight, we offer a systematic cloud solution to tracking equipment maintenance. The easily integrable, one-time install sensors allow gym staff to view maintenance schedules, machine usage, and a floor heatmap that offer live analytics at a single glance. OnSight also notifies workers with real-time updates when it detects irregularities, reducing the necessity for manual inspections with an integrated cloud solution.

Check out how OnSight can save costs in real time or book a free demo today to get started on improving your gym for the long-term!