Gym Floor Zoning

The nine zone types

Cardio

Groups treadmills, bikes, rowers and ergs. Colour and reporting only.

Free Weights

Groups racks, platforms, dumbbells and benches. No spacing rule reads it; free weight spacing is checked per item, wherever the item stands.

Machines

Groups selectorised and plate loaded machines. Colour and reporting only.

Functional

The only zone type the audit inspects. It measures the open floor left inside the polygon you draw.

Stretching

Groups mats and recovery equipment. Colour and reporting only.

Group Fitness

Groups studio and class floor. Colour and reporting only.

Reception

Marks front desk and waiting areas so they are visible in the report.

Locker Rooms

Marks changing and utility space. Useful for excluding it from the floor you are actually planning.

Custom

Anything the other eight do not cover, with a colour you pick.

What drawing a zone changes

• •Tints that area of the floor in the zone overlay, so the plan reads at a glance.
• •Claims the equipment standing inside it. Membership is decided by position, so moving a rack out of the polygon moves it out of the zone.
• •Enables one compliance check, and only for a functional training zone: the audit looks for 5 m of clear floor each way inside it.

And what it does not

• •It does not change any clearance figure. The spacing checked around a bench is the same inside a zone, outside one, or in a plan with no zones drawn at all.
• •It does not change collision or snapping.
• •It does not improve a score. Drawing a zone around crowded equipment adds a check rather than removing one, and seven of the nine types add nothing either way.

Area is not what gets measured

The functional training check does not ask how big the zone is. It finds the largest completely empty square inside it and compares that to 5 m. Equipment standing in the middle of a zone breaks the open floor into pieces, so two zones of identical area can land on opposite sides of the line.

Every figure below is produced by the same function the audit runs, and is reported to the nearest centimetre rather than rounded to a tenth of a metre, because the check works on a 0.25 m grid and a tenth would round several of these the generous way. Each zone is 8 by 8 m, which is 689 sq ft, and the only thing changing is what stands inside it.

One rack tucked into a corner leaves 6.25 m and still clears the figure. The same rack in the centre leaves 3.25 m and does not. Nothing about the zone changed except where one piece of equipment stands.