Equipment Audit
How many 45’s do you have? How many 35’s? How many 50 lb dumbbells? How many 20 lb med-balls? How many 45 lb barbells?
An equipment audit is something that I believe every gym should do regardless of whether or not you’re trying to plan a comp. It’s the process of itemizing all of your equipment into a spreadsheet so that when you need the information it’s readily available.
This is something that we used to take for granted and I would always assume that I knew what we had. While that may be true for some items - most people know how many rowers they have, or how many 20kg vs. 15kg barbells they have, but it’s not true for all of the equipment in the gym.
When it comes to planning the workouts for your comp this can be a tremendous time saver. Prior to the equipment audit the process of figuring out if we had enough equipment looked something like:
Plan the workouts
Based on the divisions and anticipated heat size, figure out the total amount of equipment needed for each workout.
Spend 30-60 minutes walking around the gym with a whiteboard scrap counting equipment to see if you fall short anywhere.
By having a list of all the equipment in your gym readily available you are very quickly able to review the equipment needed against your audit to figure out where you’re short and if you need to make any adjustments to the programming.
Every gym is different but in general the items I track in our equipment audit is grouped into the following categories:
Barbells
Bumper Plates
Metal Plates
Dumbbells
Kettlebells
Machines (Rowers / Bikes / SkiErgs, etc…)
Medicine Balls
AbMats
Boxes (Fixed Height, and Multi-sided)
Odd Objects (Stones, Sandbags, Sleds, Paralettes, etc…)
Squat Stands
Benches
You can edit and customize the list however works for you - the goal is to have a document or spreadsheet that is readily available that you can update whenever you need.
I also highly recommend adding a “Revision Date” somewhere on the document. We’ve all broken a few sets of bumper plates and while the audit is a good system is not 100% fool proof. If you have a revision date on the document it makes it easy to see when it was last updated and if you need to make any changes it’s easy to do.