Lord's Cricket Ground
performance center

Start with the people, not the equipment catalogue.

The right mix comes down to who's actually going to use the space, how they like to train, and the experience the operator wants to create. A performance centre, a hotel gym, a boutique studio and a community leisure centre are chasing completely different goals so why would they need the same kit?

Most modern commercial gyms bring together cardio, free weights, resistance machines and functional training. That part's fairly standard. What separates a good gym from a great one is the balance between them.

Take Lord's. The brief was all about personal training and athletic development, so instead of cramming the room with as much equipment as it could hold, we built a premium environment with dedicated zones for strength, cardio, conditioning, stretching and Pilates. Every space earned its place.

There's no magic number. Anyone who gives you one without seeing your space is guessing.

A smaller, intelligently designed gym will often beat a much bigger one with a poor layout, hands down. What actually matters isn't square footage it's how much usable space you have, how many people need to train at once, and the kind of training you want to support.

And equipment footprint is only part of the sum. You need room around each piece for safe movement, clear paths between zones, and enough open floor for stretching, functional work and personal training sessions.

That's exactly why space and gym floor planning has to come first before a single piece of equipment gets ordered, not after.

No single machine does it. If there were a magic piece of kit that melted fat on its own, we'd have sold out years ago. The truth is simpler: the best equipment is whatever gets people back in the gym, consistently, week after week.

Cardio machines treadmills, bikes, rowers; are brilliant for burning energy and building cardiovascular fitness. But strength equipment, free weights and functional training tools matter just as much, helping people build and hold onto muscle while making every session a genuine full-body challenge.

That's exactly why modern commercial gyms don't stack the floor with one category and call it done. They blend cardio, strength and functional training, because real results come from variety, not volume of any single machine.

Good gym design gives people options. Great gym design makes those options work together.

Honestly, it's the wrong question!

In a well-designed gym, you're not choosing one over the other, you're using both, in the right places, for the right reasons.

Free weights such as, dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells let the body move the way it's meant to. They build real strength, stability and control, and they're endlessly versatile: a relatively small footprint can support hundreds of different exercises.

Machines earn their place too. They guide movement along a fixed path, which makes them approachable for someone just starting out, and precise enough for an experienced athlete looking to isolate a muscle group or load safely.

We don't see it as free weights versus machines. The best training spaces are built around the people using them, how they train, what they're working towards, what keeps them coming back. That's what shapes the balance of free weights, machines and functional kit we design into every space.

Put simply: any exercise where your muscles work against resistance. That resistance might come from dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, machines, cables, bands or nothing more than your own bodyweight.

And it's not just about how much you can lift. Strength training builds muscular strength, power, stability and physical resilience, which is exactly why it belongs everywhere from someone's first ever gym session to elite athletic programmes.

That means a good strength zone in a commercial gym can't just cater to the confident, experienced lifters. It needs to work for everyone.

What you see isn't the whole story. What's underneath matters just as much sometimes more.

Commercial gyms take a hammering: repeated impact, heavy equipment, dropped weights, constant foot traffic. Without the right foundation beneath it, all that energy has to go somewhere usually straight into the building, where it shows up as noise, vibration and, over time, damage to the structural floor.

The right subfloor and shock-absorbing system takes that impact before it becomes a problem. Done properly, it protects the building, improves acoustics, adds comfort underfoot and extends the life of the finished floor.

Here's the bit people often get wrong: it's not about grabbing the thickest rubber tile on the shelf. Different zones make different demands. A heavy free-weight area needs serious impact protection; a stretching or cardio zone doesn't carry anywhere near the same load.

Get the foundation right from day one, and you save yourself a lot of hassle and a lot of money down the line.