Gym Decoration Ideas: From the Curb to the Mat

Imagine it's a Thursday, it's 6:40pm, and somebody who has only ever seen your gym on Instagram is sitting in a parked car out front. They booked a trial class.

They're trying to work out which door is yours.

Everything that person sees in the next ten minutes is decoration, in the broad sense. The sign, the window, the lobby, the wall behind the mats, and the bathroom they'll use before class because they're nervous.

That's the order these gym decoration ideas follow, from the curb to the mat.

(If you're decorating a garage gym, you're welcome to read along, but your only member is you, and you already know where the door is.)

To keep things concrete, I'll use a made-up gym: Spackle & Sprawl MMA, a 2,400-square-foot school in a former mattress store. The walls are still mattress-store white, and the owner is working with a small budget.

Decorate in the Order Your Visitors See It

The easiest way to work out how to decorate a gym is to arrive like a stranger.

Park where a visitor would park. Look for the sign and try the door. Stand in the lobby and notice where your eyes land first.

Hanshi Dave Kovar made this point in a Gymdesk webinar: first impressions are plural. There's the first website visit, the first walk-in, the first time on the floor, and the first class.

So bring your phone and photograph every stop.

You are not you, you are the potential members you want streaming through the front door. The photos show you what your eyes stopped noticing months ago. (The lost-and-found hoodies, for instance, have been on that bench since spring.)

Outside: Help People Find the Door

A lot of gyms live in strip malls, industrial parks, and the back half of a building.

The first job of the outside is plain: tell people you're here, and which door is yours.

Signs people can read from the road

Put the gym's name and what you teach on the sign.

"Spackle & Sprawl" tells a driver nothing. "Spackle & Sprawl MMA · BJJ · Kickboxing" tells them enough to pull in.

Make the letters big enough to read at driving speed, and light the sign.

Signs work before there's even a building. Mike Jaramillo is a co-owner of Renzo Gracie East Side these days.

At his first gym in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he and his partner signed up more than 800 people on a pre-sale using a small trailer and some signs, before the building was finished.

Use your windows

Windows are free wall space that faces the street.

Put the class schedule on them, the styles you teach, and a big photo of a real class with real members in it. St Johns Boxing in North Portland leans on window signs and word of mouth to bring people in.

If you can, keep the lower part of the glass clear.

People walking past like to look in, and a clear window is the cheapest version of what Chicago MMA did with its walls (more on that in a minute).

Light the entrance after dark

Evening classes run in the dark for half the year.

Light the path from the parking lot to the door. For a nervous first-timer, that does more than any mural inside.

The Front Door and Lobby

The lobby is where a visitor decides to stay for the trial, or to remember an urgent errand and leave.

Let people see the training from the door

When Misho Ceko built Chicago MMA's South Loop location, he took the front desk out.

The entrance reads like a living room. Glass walls and fights playing on TVs let a newcomer see the room and the training before they go anywhere near a mat.

He built it that way on purpose. The gyms he came up in did the opposite:

You don't need glass walls to get some of that effect.

A window in the mat-room door, a doorway left open during warm-ups, or a couch with a clear view of the mat all let a visitor watch before they commit.

What they see matters too. Marcos Flexa of Carlson Gracie Amsterdam put it this way:

At his gym, you open the door and see kids on the mat. If you teach kids, make sure the view from your door lands on their class.

Make the front desk a welcome

A front desk has two jobs. It greets people, and it checks them in. Clutter is bad at both.

Clear the counter. Keep one tablet on it for check-in, and move the clipboard, the cash box, and the stack of waivers somewhere out of sight.

How check-in itself should work is a separate decision, and the guide to setting up a gym check-in system walks through the options.

Put your merch on the wall behind or beside the desk.

A rack of shirts and rash guards decorates the lobby and sells at the same time. There are more gym merchandise ideas for a wider range.

Spackle & Sprawl's desk loses its pile of paperwork and gains a hook rail of club shirts.

Give parents somewhere to sit

If you teach kids, parents are half your lobby traffic and pay nearly all the kids' bills. Hang the kids' class photos where they wait, at eye level for a parent.

Forte Jiu-Jitsu in Arizona is building a parent viewing area with a TV, couches, and coffee. It's set up so parents can watch class without coaching from the sideline.

Every kids' coach knows the sideline coach. No class needs a dad yelling "use your hips!" at a four-year-old who is lying on his back studying the ceiling.

Comfortable seats with a clear view of the mat cover most of it. Coffee covers the rest.

The Training Floor

Members spend the whole class on the floor, so the decor in here has to survive sweat and the occasional takedown into the wall.

Building a room from scratch is a bigger gym interior design job, and the Alliance San Fernando Valley story in modern BJJ academy design walks through one from the ground up. Most owners are working with the room they've got, so the ideas below start there.

Walls that say who you are

Most gym wall decor starts with a logo and some paint. A few gyms go a lot further.

Unicorn Jiu-Jitsu has unicorns on the walls. (Of course it does.) A guest coach painted the murals on canvas, set off by teal accent walls, so the owners can take the unicorns with them when they move.

G.I.R.L.S. Gym in Portland has its fist-and-face logo painted large, a smaller round version on the mat wall, and "NO EXCUSES" painted across the mat-room wall.

OB Jiu-Jitsu Collective in San Diego turned a former theater into a gallery. Local artists show and sell their work on the walls. The gym says the new look "won a little award for redecorating the space from the local community."

A mural doesn't have to be a big commission.

The Spackle & Sprawl owner paints one accent wall in the brand color and puts the logo on it, behind the mat where every class photo gets taken. That's a weekend.

When Subforce Jiu-Jitsu changed hands, the only things members noticed were a new check-in system and a fresh coat of paint.

On color, pick it for your brand and the mood you want. The research is mixed: in one small study, cyclists watching green scenery reported lower exertion, while in another, running in a green environment went with higher perceived exertion.

So be wary of anyone promising that the right paint will make members train harder.

One counterpoint on what goes on walls. Seiji Sugiman-Marangos of Tanuki Martial Arts keeps the rules off them:

He credits slow intake. New people arrive a few at a time and get absorbed into how things are done there.

A belt or achievement wall

For a martial arts school, a belt wall may be the most useful thing you hang. Promotion photos, a rack of belts in rank order, competition medals.

A new student can see where the path goes, and a current student can find their own face on it.

Fitness gyms have their own version: a PR board, a challenge leaderboard, or a whiteboard with this month's names on it.

Keep it current. A wall of promotion photos from 2019 says the last good year was 2019.

Schools running a lot of tests can borrow from the guide to managing belt promotions at scale.

Mirrors, placed with care

Mirrors have been studied too, and the results split.

In a 2014 study of 104 college students, riders cycled faster in front of a mirror and fitness-celebrity posters. The women in that same setup also felt the most tense afterward.

An earlier lab study found that sedentary women who exercised with others in front of a mirror felt less revitalized, more exhausted, and more self-conscious.

So put mirrors where technique needs them: the striking area, the lifting platform. And keep a room, or at least a corner, where a beginner isn't watching themselves for the whole hour.

Mats and flooring

In a martial arts school, the mats cover most of the floor, which makes them the biggest decor decision you'll make.

Color, seams, and condition all show up in every photo.

Prices vary a lot by type. Greatmats lists 1.25-inch EVA puzzle tiles at just over $2 per square foot and 1.5-inch grappling mats at just over $3.

The cheaper tiles cover the minimum cushion Greatmats says you need to practice BJJ safely. The thicker grappling mats give more fall protection, and they're popular for regional and national competitions.

For a weights corner, rubber flooring rolls run $1.25 to $2 per square foot at 1/4 inch and $2.75 to $3.50 at 1/2 inch.

Here's how that plays out at Spackle & Sprawl. With 1,200 square feet of mat space, the cheapest 1.25-inch tiles come to a bit over $2,400, and the 1.5-inch competition tiles come to a bit over $3,600.

A 200-square-foot rubber corner at 1/2 inch adds $550 to $700.

Two mat colors can mark zones (kids' area, warm-up lane, open mat) without a single sign. The full equipment budget is in the guide to BJJ academy startup costs.

Lighting and sound

You notice bad lighting the second you walk in, and you stop noticing it a week later. Members don't.

An elementary-school gym needs about 30 foot-candles of light, per Illuminating Engineering Society targets in a Bonneville Power Administration guide. Professional sport goes up to 125.

A lighting supplier puts fitness centers at 30 to 40 foot-candles. If your room looks dim in photos, it probably is.

Sound counts too, even though nobody can see it. In a University of Maryland study, spin-class music ran 93 to 101 decibels. More than one in four riders reported ringing or muffled hearing afterward.

The classes that ran two to three decibels quieter showed no drop in workout intensity.

OSHA's rule of thumb is easy to test during class: if you have to raise your voice to talk to someone three feet away, it's probably over 85 decibels. If your classes fail that test, your coaches stand in it all day.

Turn it down a notch. The coach should win the volume fight.

Locker Rooms and Bathrooms

Nobody posts their gym bathroom. Everybody judges it.

Clean comes first. In a 2017 survey by Zogics, 83% of gym members said cleanliness matters when deciding which gym to join.

Zogics sells cleaning supplies, so it has a horse in this race. Still, nobody has ever left a trial class complaining the bathroom was too clean.

The gym cleaning checklist covers the routine. After that, the small upgrades are cheap: hooks, a shelf for phones and keys, a decent mirror, brighter bulbs, and fresh paint.

Gym Decoration Items at a Glance

Here are the gym decoration ideas from the walk-through as one shopping list, with what each item does and a rough cost.

Where nobody publishes a price, the cost column says what it takes instead.

Grand Opening Decorations

Opening day gets its own set of gym decoration ideas: banners, a balloon arch, a big printed class schedule by the door, and a photo spot with your logo behind it.

Most of that is temporary, and it should be. Balloons look festive on day one and sad by day four.

Keep what still works on day 30. The schedule poster, the logo wall, and the photo spot can stay.

The Spackle & Sprawl opening-day photo wall becomes the permanent accent wall, which saves a weekend.

The event itself, with the trials, the promotion, and the follow-up, is covered in the guide to running a gym grand opening.

A Gym Decoration Budget That Fits

Most gym decoration ideas sort into three sizes of project. The table above prices the items one at a time.

This one is about order: what to do first, with Spackle & Sprawl's picks as the example.

Start with the weekend tier. It's the cheapest, and it shows up in every class photo.

If what you need is more room, decor won't fix it, and the guide to expanding your gym is a better place to start. If you're still pricing the whole project, see the cost to open a gym.

Where Your Gym Software Shows Up on the Walk-Through

A few of these stops run through your software, whether you planned it or not.

• The front desk. Gymdesk's front desk mode turns a tablet at the entrance into a self-serve station for check-ins, sign-ups, and payments. A member checks in and a walk-in signs up without anyone leaving the mat. Exiting the mode takes the manager's password, so the tablet stays a check-in station and doesn't become the lobby's YouTube machine.
• The belt wall. Gymdesk's belt tracking keeps each student's ranks with their promotion dates, and a promotion can trigger an automatic congratulations message. The wall stays current without a separate list to maintain, and the student hears about the promotion the same day.
• The website. Your gym website builder comes with every Gymdesk account, including a gallery that pulls from your gym's photos. Put the newly painted room on it, so the room people see online matches the one they walk into.

Decorate for the Person Standing in the Doorway

Back to the parked car.

The trial visitor sitting outside Spackle & Sprawl can find the door now. The sign's lit.

Walk your own gym from the curb this week and fix the first stop that makes you wince.

If the front desk is that stop, you can see Gymdesk pricing and set up front desk mode on the tablet you already have.