Gym cleaning checklist - guide to keeping your gym clean, safe and member-ready

Keeping your gym clean is about giving your members a safe place to come to. Going to the gym should be a great experience, one that makes people want to keep coming back. And it's not always about the shiny equipment. No one likes walking into a stinky gym, no matter how good the machines are.

Picture walking into the gym and catching an odour, or heading into the change room and finding rubbish left there, or a floor that's sticky underfoot. People aren't going to want to renew their membership after that, no matter how good the classes or the equipment are.

A gym is a place where people come to be healthy, so we want them to feel like we care about their health. Every time someone walks into your gym, you want it to show that you care about the wellbeing of your members, not just how the equipment looks in a photo.

What a proper checklist covers

Having a genuine cleaning checklist for your gym or wellness facility comes down to a few things: the floors, touch points for disinfection, staff habits to be mindful of, signage to think about, and partnering with a specialist gym cleaner. A commercial gym cleaner gives you that peace of mind and takes care of all the things you just don't have time to get to.

The Australian health guidelines for gyms set out recommended cleaning for frequently touched surfaces, and in a gym, that could be a lot of places. There's also research on gym equipment and bacteria worth pointing to as an authoritative source on why this matters.

Areas to cover on your checklist

Here's what to look at, area by area. Some of it's about first impressions, some of it's about hygiene, but it all adds up to how the gym feels to someone using it.

Front of house

Reception needs to be cleaned. Door handles, railings, fingerprints on glass, smudges, rubbish bins, all of it. Seating areas and any brochure stands or sign-in screens need wiping down too, since these get touched by every single person walking in the door. Even the windows and entry mats count, since they're the first thing a member sees before they've even got their gym bag off their shoulder.

Gym floor and equipment

This is basically all of that space. Towels being left around need to be picked up. Sweat marks need wiping down. Equipment needs to be tidied and straightened up, including dumbbells and plates put back where they belong. 

Handles, screens and seats on cardio machines need attention, and benches used for weights work need wiping between users. Wipes on the floor and spray need topping up, more often than you'd think. Mirrors on the gym floor pick up smudges and fingerprints too, and they're easy to overlook when there's so much else going on.

Studio and class spaces

Class spaces need their own attention. Music pumping, everyone moving around from mat to mat, working up a sweat together. Mats need to be cleaned between classes, not just at the end of the day, and any shared props like resistance bands or foam rollers need wiping down too before the next group comes in.

Change rooms

This is quite a big one. Bins that need tidying, showers that need scrubbing, basins that get clogged, soap that needs refilling, floors that need mopping, water that's puddled, bins, handles, lockers. Mirrors need wiping, and if there are hairdryers or grooming stations, those need checking too. With people coming and going, change rooms can get grimy quite fast, and it's important for health reasons that they're kept properly clean, right down to the bench seats and hooks.

Staff habits and signage

Staff habits play a part in all of this too. Wiping down a machine after showing a member how to use it, checking bins between classes, keeping an eye on the change rooms during a busy afternoon. None of it takes long on its own, but it adds up over the day. A quick check at the start and end of each shift can catch a lot before it becomes a bigger job.

Signage is worth thinking about as well. A reminder near the weights to wipe equipment down after use, or something showing when an area was last checked, tells members the standard is being kept up, not just talked about. It also helps set the expectation with members that they've got a part to play too, which matters in a space that's shared by so many people every day.

Air flow

Then there's air flow to your property. Are you using it properly? Whether that's natural air flow or air conditioning, it helps with odour rather than just masking the problem. You really need proper air flow, but this doesn't replace proper cleaning from a proper professional gym cleaner like Wheatley and Sons. Airflow can clear a smell out of a room, but it won't clean a sticky floor or a clogged basin, so it works best alongside a proper cleaning routine rather than in place of one.

Partnering with a team that knows gyms

We've been in a lot of gyms and fitness and wellness centres, so we know what it's like in the real world. Busy schedules and busy class routines mean things get missed when you're trying to cover it all yourself, on top of running classes and looking after members. 

Partnering with a specialist gym cleaner, a commercial gym cleaner, means someone else is taking care of all the things you just don't have time to get to, and gives you that peace of mind that your gym is being properly looked after.

That's the partnership we offer at Wheatley and Sons. We work around your class timetable rather than getting in the way of it, and we know the areas that need the most attention because we've seen them in gym after gym, from front of house through to the change rooms. If you'd like to talk through what that could look like for your facility, get in touch with our team and we'll take it from there.