If you have been asked to put a gym in your property and you are not sure where to start, this is the whole process in order.

How much space you actually need, what rules out equipment before budget does, how long it really takes, and what to have ready before anyone quotes you.

FOR HOTELS, RESORTS, CONDOMINIUMS, OFFICES AND SERVICED APARTMENTS

FINISHED HOSPITALITY GYM, KANDAL

Most people planning their first gym start in the wrong place: a supplier catalogue. The catalogue cannot tell you whether the room works, and by the time equipment is quoted, the decisions that matter have usually already been made by accident. This guide runs in the order the project actually happens.

It takes about twelve minutes to read. If you only have two, take the three measurements in the next section and skip to the layout offer at the end, that is genuinely all we need to give you something useful back.

HOSPITALITY GYM PLANNING GUIDE

1. START WITH THREE NUMBERS

USABLE FLOOR AREA

CEILING HEIGHT

TOTAL FACILITY UNITS/ROOMS

Before equipment, before budget, before style, there are three measurements that determine what is possible in your room. Everything else in this guide depends on them, and a supplier who does not ask for all three has not thought about your project.

USABLE FLOOR AREA

Not the room's total area — the area left once you remove columns, the door swing, the space in front of a window that has to stay clear, and any part of the room too narrow to stand a machine in. In an L-shaped room, measure it as two rectangles. This number decides how many pieces of equipment you can fit, and it is almost always smaller than the number on the floor plan.

CEILING HEIGHT

Measure to the lowest thing overhead, not to the slab. Beams, ducting, sprinkler heads and light fittings all count. A room with a 3.2 m slab and a 2.5 m duct running through the middle of it is a 2.5 m room where that duct is.

TOTAL FACILITY UNITS/ROOMS

The number of units in your facility is very useful. Whether you're a hotel with 100 rooms, or a serviced apartment with 20 units, it can help determine a rough total number of users that will have access to your amenity or facility. This allows you to plan for peak usage compared to your gym space allocation.

THE THREE NUMBERS

Write them down now. They are all you need to get a free 2D layout from us at the end of this guide, and they are the first three things any competent supplier will ask you for.

2. WHAT THE GYM IS ACTUALLY FOR

"A gym" means something different at every property type, and the difference shows up in what gets used. Before you specify anything, be clear which of these you are building.

AN AMENITY, OR A FACILITY

An amenity exists so that property can list it. It gets a photograph, it satisfies a booking filter, and it is used lightly. A facility exists because people train in it, repeatedlly, for years, with expectation.

Hotels and boutique properties often think that they need the first. Condominiums, serviced apartments and corporate gyms almost always need the second. In reality, a room built as an amenity often face issues within the first year: Equipment wears out faster, guest experiences decrease, the range is too narrow for people training regularly, and more.

WHO USES IT, AND HOW OFTEN

Hotel: Guests train once or twice in a two-to-three night stay. Peak is early morning. Nobody is on duty, so everything has to be safe to use alone by someone who has never seen it before.

Resort: Longer stays than hotels, often three or more sessions. Wider age range, and low-impact machines get as much use as treadmills. Humidity and salt air punish cheap finishes.

Condominium: The same residents, most days, for years. They outgrow a cardio-led room within months. Peak load is concentrated in the early morning and after 18:00.

Serviced apartment: Guests stay weeks or months and train like residents, while the budget is usually set like a hotel's. This is the most commonly under-specified room of the six.

Corporate office: Compressed into three windows a day. Capacity at peak matters more than range, and the room usually sits above or beside occupied offices.

Boutique hotel: Judged on how it looks and feels before what is in it. Fewer, better, well-finished pieces beat a crowded room.

WHAT HAS CHANGED?

Guest expectations have moved toward strength training. A room that is three treadmills and a bike reads as dated now, in every one of these segments. Cardio still matters, but it should take roughly a quarter of the room rather than half of it.

FINISHED HOSPITALITY GYM - SERVICED APARTMENT

3. HOW MUCH SPACE YOU NEED

This is the question we are asked most, and the one most often answered badly, usually by whatever room happened to be free. Here is how to work it out properly.

A piece of commercial gym equipment needs roughly 5 m² including the space around it. That figure is not the machine's footprint; it is the footprint plus the room to get on and off it, the walkway behind it, and the clearance it needs from the next machine. Some pieces need less, a rack or a cable crossover needs considerably more, but across a whole room 5 m² per piece holds up well as a planning number.

From there the arithmetic is simple. A complete hospitality gym, enough cardio, a full set of strength machines, a cable station, dumbbells and benches, comes to about fifteen to seventeen pieces. At 5 m² each, that is 75 to 100 m². That is not our opinion of a nice gym; it is what the equipment physically requires.

2.4 meter: the practical floor. Below this most cardio equipment is unusable, because the user's head is 30–40 cm above the deck when they run.

2.7 meter: a comfortable minimum for a general hospitality gym.

3.0 m and above: needed for a cable crossover, stair climber, pull-up work, or anything a user stands on.

IF YOUR ROOM IS SMALLER THAN 50 m²

Between 30 and 50 m² you can fit six to ten pieces. That is a real gym and it can be a good one, but you are choosing roughly half of a complete list, so choose deliberately rather than by what is cheapest. In practice, that means: two cardio units instead of four, dual-function strength machines instead of single-function ones, one cable station rather than two, and a dumbbell set with a rack. What you give up is capacity at peak times and the heavier end of the strength range.

Below 30 m² you have a piece of equipment in a room rather than a facility, and it is worth being honest with yourself about whether it will earn its space. If the answer is that the property needs something, the best version is usually a functional trainer, a dumbbell set with a bench, mats and a mirror. A room that does a few things properly instead of many things badly.

CEILING HEIGHTS, IN NUMBERS

A LOW CEILING SPACE - CAN REQUIRE CUSTOM EQUIPMENT

BOUTIQUE HOTELS ARE THE DELIBERATE EXCEPTION

Many are designed at 15 to 35 m² because the room is part of the property's design story rather than a facility people train in daily. That is a valid choice, and our boutique checklist is built exactly for that: Fewer, better-finished pieces in a space that has to look considered. If you are planning a boutique property, use the checklist rather than the figure in the table above.

4. WHERE TO PUT THE GYM

Given a choice of rooms, the differences that matter are not the ones most people weigh.

Natural light beats floor area

A 70 m² room with windows is used more than a 100 m² room in a basement. It also photographs, which affects bookings.

Visibility drives use

A gym people walk past on the way to the pool or the lift gets used. A gym at the end of a service corridor on level B1 does not, however good the equipment is.

What is above and below

Below decides your flooring. Above decides whether you will be fighting noise complaints from the room over the top of it.

Ventilation and Cooling

Gym rooms are almost always under-cooled for their real load, because the original design brief treated the room as storage or a spare guest room. Budget for an upgrade rather than discovering it in the first hot month.

The delivery route

Walk the route from the loading area to the room before you commit. Service lifts, door widths, corridor turns, stairs, etc. This is covered properly in the next section, because it is the thing that most often goes worng.

Proximity to pool and spa

Where the wellness facilities sit together, all of them get used more. This is where businesses can start reaping the benefits from the investment of a gym facility.

POSITION WITHIN THE PROPERTY DOES MORE FOR USAGE THAN EQUIPMENT CHOICE

5. WHAT RULES OUT EQUIPMENT BEFORE BUDGET

Three physical constraints decide what can go in your room. None of them are negotiable, all three are cheap to check now, and every one of them is expensive to discover after all the agreement's signed.

CEILING HEIGHT

Covered in the previous section, but worth repeating as a hard limit! The lowest obstruction in the room is your ceiling height, not the slab. A treadmill needs the user's standing height plus the deck plus roughly 40 cm of headroom. Cable crossover needs 3m or you cannot safely use the pull-up bar.

FLOOR LOADING

Commercial equipment is heavy, and it concentrates that weight on four small feet. A loaded rack, a Smith machine or a plate-loaded leg press puts a point load into your slab that a residential floor design did not anticipate. On upper floors, and particularly in converted rooms, this is a question for the building's structural drawings, not a judgement call to be made on site on delivery day.

ACCESS TO THE ROOM

Equipment arrives in crates, and the crates have to reach the room. Measure the service lift's internal dimensions and door opening, every door on the route, and the tightest corridor turn. A standard treadmill crate will not fit in many service lifts. When it does not, the options are a stair carry, partial disassembly, or a crane, all of which cost money and time nobody has quoted for, and all of which are avoidable with a tape measure and twenty minutes.

THE TWENTY-MINUTE CHECK

Walk the delivery route with a tape measure and write down: lift internal width, depth and door height; the narrowest doorway; the tightest turn. Send those with your room dimensions and a supplier can tell you what will and will not physically reach your gym. Before you order anything.

6. WHAT GOES IN THE ROOM

CARDIO: ABOUT A QUARTER OF THE ROOM

Cardio is essential and it is where the first machines should go, but depth beats variety. Two treadmills serve a hotel better than one treadmill and one stepper, because at 7am both guests want the treadmill. After treadmills, a cross trainer covers the people who cannot run daily, and a stair climber is the piece guests now actively look for.

SELECTORIZED MACHINES CARRY THE STRENGTH SIDE

Pin-loaded machines, the ones with a weight stack and a pin, are the safest choice in a room with nobody supervising. There is no loose weight to drop, no spotter needed, and the movement path is fixed. In a smaller room, five dual-function machines cover the whole body:

Chest press / shoulder press

Pec fly / rear delt

Lat pulldown / low row

Leg curl / leg extension

Leg press / calf raise

In a larger room you replace those five frames with the single-function versions, which is nine or ten machines rather than five, and is the main reason a bigger room ends up feeling like a real gym.

THEN FREE WEIGHTS, THEN PLATE-LOADED

Dumbbells are used more than every machine in the room combined. A set from 2.5 kg to 25 kg in 2.5 kg increments, on a proper rack, with two adjustable benches, is the highest-value purchase after cardio. A Smith machine and a half squat rack are the two frames worth adding after that, both give guests barbell work with a fixed path and safeties, which is what makes them appropriate in an unsupervised room. Plate-loaded machines come last and only make sense in larger rooms; in anything under about 80 m² the space is better spent elsewhere.

CABLE STATIONS, SIZED TO THE ROOM

A functional trainer covers more exercises per square metre than anything else you can buy. Going up (bigger space), the sizing ladder runs cable crossover, then a four-station, then five, then eight-station. Functional trainers and cable crossovers are the right answers for most hospitality rooms.

FLOORING IS EQUIPMENT, NOT FINISHING

Specify 20–25 mm interlocking rubber tiles under the free-weight area first, that is the only part of the floor that genuinely takes a beating. If budget allows, carry the same tile through the whole room, or spend the difference on a premium floor for the main area. Where an occupied room sits below, add acoustic underlay. More on why this matters in the mistakes section.

A FULL DUMBBELL RANGE ON A PROPER RACK - THE MOST-USED EQUIPMENT IN ANY HOSPITALITY GYM

Equipment selection has its own detailed checklist for each property type. You can grab one that best match your facility, completely FREE of course.

7. HOW LONG IT TAKES

There are two phases, and only one of them is under the supplier's control.

BEFORE AGREEMENT - VARIABLE, AND MOSTLY YOURS

Brief, first layout, revisions, equipment selection, quotation, sign-off. This phase takes as long as your decision-making takes.

Properties with a clear brief and one decision-maker move through it in two or three weeks. Properties waiting on an owner overseas, or changing the room halfway, take months. If your opening date is fixed, this is the phase to compress, not production.

AFTER AGREEMENT - 90 TO 120 DAYS

PLAN AROUND MAJOR HOLIDAYS

Chinese New Year, Khmer New Year, Pchum Ben, Year End Holidays. During these times, production can shut down, slow down, and operations can run at reduced capacity. A project that would take 100 days can take 130 if it straddles the holiday. Ask any supplier quoting you in October how they have accounted for it.

For Reference: FitLabs has not delivered a late project to date. That is a claim worht asking any supplier to make, and to back up with two references you can call.

8. WHAT MUST BE READY BEFORE EQUIPMENT ARRIVES

Installation days go wrong for the same handful of reasons every time, and all of them are site readiness rather than equipment problems.

1. Flooring laid and cured

Equipment goes on top of the floor, not the other way round. Retro-fitting flooring around installed machines means moving every piece twice. An exception for interlocking rubber flooring since it doesn't require gluing and curing time.

2. Power in the right places.

Every motorized cardio unit needs a socket where the machine will stand, not where the room's original wiring happend to put one. Confirm voltage and circuit capacity against the equipment specs.

3. Mirrors mounted

Mirror fixing is a wall job and it is far easier before the floor is full of machines. However, it's one of the more managable things to do even after the equipment's installed.

4. Ventilation and cooling working

Commission the AC before the room opens, not after the first complaint.

5. The room empty and clean

An install crew should not be moving your furniture.

6. Access booked

Service lift reserved, loading bay arranged, before and after-hours permissions confirmed, and finished floors on the route protected. (We've done quite a few so we know!)

7. Somewhere for the packaging to go

A full install can sometimes have a full container worth of equipment. That's a full room's worth of cardboard, pallets and plastics. Agree in advance who removes it, or it will sit in your corridor for a week. (A good supplier will take care of that for you, but don't forget to ask)

CRATED EQUIPMENT ON ARRIVAL

INSTALL DAY ON SITE

9. 2D AND 3D LAYOUTS, AND WHAT EACH ONE NEEDS

A layout is where planning stops being abstract. There are two kinds and they are not interchangeable, so it is worth knowing which one you need and what it costs you to get it.

A 2D LAYOUT

A scaled plan view of your room with the equipment placed in it. It answers the questions that matter earliest: does this fit, how many pieces, where do the walkways go, what is left over. It needs only your room dimensions and ceiling height, it can be produced quickly, and it costs you nothing to ask for. For most properties, a 2D layout is enough to decide whether to proceed.

2D & 3D RENDERS PRODUCED DURING PLANNING FOR HOSPITALITY PROJECTS

A 3D LAYOUT

A Rendored view of the finished room, with your floor, wall colors, lighting and finishes. It's what you show an owner or a board, and it is how you settle arguments about how the room will feel. It needs more input: A floor plan, photographs of the actual space, ceiling, and might require a site visit. That work is why 3D comes later in the process, normally once the direction is agreed.

10. CHOOSING WHO BUILDS IT

Equipment is the easy part. What separates suppliers is everything after the delivery: whether they answer the phone in year three, whether they follow through with their warranty and maintenance obligations, and whether anyone is accountable when a machine stops working during a full house.

There's a FREE 12-Question-Checklist that you can download to ask equipment vendors. It's a very useful tool to have when you're thinking to communicating with potential gym equipment vendors.

Just click the link below, it will take you to the section where you have to fill out simple basic information, and you can download it after right away.

11. RUNNING IT ONCE IT OPENS

A hospitality gym often time runs unstaffed, which means the room has to look after itself between service visits. Three things keep it working.

1. Daily housekeeping

Wipe-down of upholstery and contact surfaces, restocking wipes and towels, and putting dumbbells back on the rack. Ten minutes a day is the difference between a room guests use and a room they photograph and complain about.

2. Servicing twice a year

Bolts and screws tighten, cables and belts stretch, pivot points need lubrication, upholstery tears get worse. A semi-annual service catches all of it while it is still small. Equipment that is serviced lasts years longer than identical equipment that is not.

3. Signage and Rules

Opening hours, a rules board, emergency contact, and a first-aid kit. In most jurisdictions some version of this is a requirement for an unsupervised facility — check what applies to your property.

Consumables wear out on their own schedule regardless of how good the equipment is: treadmill belts, cables, grips, upholstery. Knowing that in advance is what makes the maintenance budget in the next section defensible.

12. THE FOUR MISTAKES WE SEE MOST

These are not hypothetical. They are the four things that most often go wrong on hospitality projects, in the order we encounter them.

CHEAP FLOORING

Low-grade rubber off-gasses. In an air-conditioned room with limited to no ventilation, the smell does not fade, and it is the first thing every guest notices when the door opens. It can make an otherwise excellent room unusable, and there is no fix short of lifting the entire floor and replacing it. Flooring is the least glamorous line on the quotation and the one least worth saving money on.

NO MAINTENANCE BUDGET

The situation is almost always the same: the person who signs for the gym is the owner, who sees a one-time capital cost; the person who lives with it is the manager, who has no line item for repairs.

Result: small faults and issues go unreported until they become large ones. Every piece of equipment, at every price point, develops issues. THAT'S NORMAL WEAR, NOT A DEFECT. Fixing them early extends the life of the equipment dramatically. Agree a maintenance budget at the same time as the purchase, while the owner is still in the room

CHEAP EQUIPMENT

The problem is not that it breaks, though it does. The problem is that guests can tell. Thin padding, rattling/shaking frames, stiff adjustment pins and worn cables = Property that cut corners. The Gym is one of the few rooms where a guest physically handles your furniture. It is a small saving that shows up in satisfactions and reviews.

MIXED EQUIPMENT FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES

Assembling a room from several suppliers to chase the best price on each item produces a room of mismatched colors, finishes, and mechanisms. It looks incoherent in photographs, and more practically, it confuses guests. Every machine adjusts differently, the pins work differently, nothing is where the last machine taught them to expect it. A coherent room is easier to use, and it is the single biggest visual difference between a considered facility and a collection of purchases.

BONUS MISTAKE # 5 WE SEE MANY TIMES IN HOSPITALITY GYMS

Accessibility. Yes, it's important that, in terms of equipment, getting them in and out of your facility. Easy access to equipment means big repairs can happen much easier and less costly. Suppliers are able to bring equipment off-site, even bring in a 'Loaner Unit' to reduce downtime. All of these can make a facility operate smoothly, all year round.

SEND US THREE NUMBERS.

GET A 2D LAYOUT BACK.

No cost, no commitment, and no obligation to buy anything. If your room works, we will show you what fits in it. If it does not, we will tell you that too. It's much better for both of us to know early.

• Room Dimensions: Length & Width, or a floor plan if you have one

• Ceiling height, measured to the lowest obstruction

• Total facility units / rooms

EMAIL: info@fitlabscambodia.com

Telegram/Whatsapp: +855 16 554 592

TEL: +855 16 554 592
WHATSAPP/TELEGRAM: +855 16 554 592

Email: info@fitlabscambodia.com

FitLabs

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