Gyms & Sports Facilities

Noise and vibration from gyms and exercise spaces can be very disturbing for sensitive occupants, such as residents, who are in the same building; This is especially the case if the suitability of a building for fit-out as a gym has not been done correctly, or at all. Good acoustic design is essential to get this to work, especially in lightweight buildings, as opposed to traditional heavy buildings built using concrete and block. Today, most residential buildings are built with lightweight systems. This then requires consideration of the baseline building response to heavy and repetitive impacts. This is where we can help!

We have an impressive amount of experience in this area and are at the forefront of guidance for best practices. We are keen to provide our services to help reduce the risk for operators looking for sites, so if you are planning to open a gym, by working with us, you will have the support and expertise available to you that you will need to find and convert the right site. We are also keen to encourage and facilitate the health and well-being benefits for society. So the more people who can enjoy the benefits of urban and suburban health and fitness in a safe and fun environment whilst ensuring others close by are not suffering stress from noise and vibration that results from these activities, the better.

So how do we do this? We do this by using the base response of the building to heavy impacts to identify what levels of mitigation treatments may be required to make the project viable. This is then used to confirm that standards have been achieved, enabling the smooth transition from site selection to fit-out to operation, without falling out with your neighbours. We also can also offer troubleshooting for residents that are affected, to assist with resolving problems that have slipped through, or where commercial residents convert to residential and require ‘Agent of change’ mitigation to be assessed.  

Our experience in this area has led us to propose a national standardised test methodology based on a practical approach to enable the real building response to various input forces to be robustly assessed in a repeatable and consistent fashion. Check out our paper on Gym Testing Methodology under the ‘Publications’ section of this site. Peter Rogers, Sustainable Acoustics’ Managing Director, is now chairing the working group of the Association of Noise Consultants in the later stages of developing new standards for acoustics in gyms. This is now in for publication and will be signposted from here when it is available as ProPG 2 - the second professional guidance endorsed by the ANC, IOA and CIEH. ​