Definitive Commercial Gym Cleaning Checklist & Guidelines

This gym cleaning checklist include the cleaning routines to ensure that you keep your school, healthcare facility gym, and commercial fitness center clean from the many different viruses, and fungi, to keep your visitors and staff healthy, happy and fit.

This is the specialized gym cleaning system that we at Universal Janitorial Services use in our fitness & gym cleaning services to deliver higher quality results while reducing cleaning time and cost.

What This Gym Cleaning Checklist & Guide Covers:

• Shower & Locker Rooms
• Fitness Equipment
• Fitness Mat Cleaning
• Rubber Floors Cleaning
• Wooden Floor Cleaning

The gym facilities are some of the dirtiest places of any fitness facility, school, health club, or healthcare facility. The perspiration and frequent touch of hundreds of people make it a breeding ground for harmful germs, viruses and parasites, and thus a high-risk place for the exchange of sickness.

The critical areas to keep clean is not only limited to the highly-trafficked and hard-to-reach surfaces associated with the fitness facilities. Gym exercise mats, shower, and locker rooms are breeding spaces for ringworms (wikipedia), athlete’s foot (Mayoclinic), and herpes simplex 1 (Healthline.com), which are highly contagious and easily transferred from person to person.

Make sure your janitorial services company trains their staff in a gym cleaning system and stick to a fixed cleaning schedule so you prevent the spread of germs so you ensure that high traffic areas, shower, and locker rooms are carefully cleaned in order to maintain the health and safety for your staff and visitors.

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How To Clean The Shower & Locker Rooms?

Daily cleaning and disinfection

The handles, faucets, floor, and toilets, in the locker rooms, is the most critical area to keep clean, in any fitness center.

The shower handle in a fitness center is frequented by hundreds of people during any given day, and the sheer traffic volume makes it five to seven times more likely to pass on fungi and bacteria, compared to a shared kitchen. The entire locker room floor is a risk for spreading athlete’s foot and plantar warts (Mayoclinic.com: Plantar Wart) from one person to the next.

Cleaning schedule:

1. Using a cloth or sponge and an eco-friendly cleaning solution, scrub and clean all exterior and interior surfaces of the lockers and locker benches.
   Let the cleaning solution dry so the cleaning agents can do their work of disinfecting the surface.
2. Using a sponge and an eco-friendly cleaning solution to scrub and clean shower faucets, handles, showerheads, sinks, and toilets.
   Again, let the solution dry after cleaning so that the cleaning agent gets time to disinfect.
3. Last, clean the floors of the shower and locker rooms using a mob and eco-friendly disinfecting cleaning solution.

How To Clean The Gym Equipment?

Daily cleaning with eco-friendly disinfectant and cloth (microfiber cloth).

Using free weights and fitness machines, treadmill, and nordic-track is like shaking hands with hundreds of people in a day. Keeping a fitness facility reasonably sanitized therefore requires daily cleaning and disinfection.

All surfaces of workout equipment should be thoroughly disinfected using a microfiber cloth and eco-friendly disinfectant.

• Dumbells
• Free weights (disks) for machines
• Benches
• Weight machine handles and seats
• Handles on treadmills, nordic tracks, and stair masters.

How To Clean The Exercise Mats?

Daily cleaning of exercise mats with an eco-friendly disinfectant.
Quarterly cleaning of exercise mats with a bleach solution (1:10 bleach/water mix)

Exercise mats require special cleaning, as they are one of the most highly trafficked areas in a fitness center by bare feet, and are hotbeds for fungi and bacteria such as ringworms and herpes simplex 1.

To prevent the spread of infections and diseases, exercise mats should be cleaned at the end of each day. Use an eco-friendly disinfectant and thoroughly scrub the contact side of the mat with sponges, cloths or mops.

It’s crucial that the sponges, cloths, and mops are used for this purpose only. Using them for other general janitorial tasks could result in cross-contamination and the spread of infectious disease or skin conditions to other places in the gym or areas outside of the fitness center.

Quarterly, all wrestling mats should be cleaned with a 1 to 10 ratio bleach mix (1 part bleach to 10 parts water) in order to maintain optimal disinfection. The bleach mix should be used to clean the mats after their regular scheduled cleaning.

Pay particular attention to the sides and creases of the rubber mats that may be pressed together to form a larger exercise area.
Important:
Separate the mats and clean the sides, allowing them to dry before putting them back together again.
Are the exercise mats damaged, or surface broken, then discard them. The inside of a mat is an optimal place for bacteria to breed, and your cleaning will have little or no effect.

How To Clean The Rubber Floors?

In the areas of free weights, fitness machines are typically covered with a rubber floor to avoid slip and brace the floor from anyone dropping free weights.

Cleaning procedure:

1. Use a plastic scraper to remove dirt, such as loose rubber or mud tracked in from shoes.
2. Vacuum the rubber fitness center floor to remove debris.
3. Mix an eco-friendly cleaner with water and use a mop to clean the rubber floor.
4. Fill a clean bucket with water and mop the entire rubber floor to remove any leftover soap that would otherwise leave a cloudy surface. Then allow the floor to dry.

How To Clean Wooden Floors?

Wooden sports floors in gym facilities should be cleaned frequently for two major reasons (1) to prevent the spread of bacteria from sweat, and (2) avoid scratching the lacquer surface and cause the need for an expensive repair.

Cleaning procedure:
Use a wide broom to speed up the process and sweep the entire floor.

Mix an eco-friendly cleaning solution using a damp mop to clean the floor.
A note of caution, DO NOT pour the cleaning solution on the floor. Wet the mop and squeeze out excess water before cleaning the floor. Excess water on a wooden floor WILL ruin the floor and make expensive repairs necessary.

If you noticed any streaks on the wood floor, use an “eraser”.

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