How Grand Rapids Christian converted a weight room with limited capacity and limited use into a fully functioning open capacity Sports Performance and Fitness Room in a matter of months

Our Team
The weight room renovation team was composed of GRC Director of Sports Performance Daimond Dixon, GRC Assistant Athletic Director Kevin Broene and Direct Fitness Solutions Rep Amy Enser-Blair. Daimond and Kevin came up with the initial layout and flow plan of how to set up the weight room, with Amy giving input on the best types of equipment to execute the goal that the pair had in mind.

The old room
The previous weight room set up featured a typical weight room setting you’d see in most ‘gyms’: wooden platforms for power lifting, weight benches, squat racks and dumbbells. The room was practical for its intended use of weight lifting, but was a bit crowded and wasn’t flexible for much use beyond that.

The old room was useful for building strength, but being a school that featured multi-sport athletes, it wasn’t as efficient. It still served its purpose to help create successful sports teams, but over time the room had become outdated.

From weight room to Sports Performance Room
We realized that to continue to grow our athletic performance program, we needed to upgrade to more than just a weight lifting room—we needed a sports performance training room. We wanted to create a room that combined strength training with the ability to also train movement based skill training of speed, agility/quickness and conditioning.

We also wanted to create a room that would not only accommodate our athletes and teams, but also be a proficient space for our PE classes and for staff use.

Equipment: What we kept, what we added
We completely traded in our old racks, platforms and benches, dumbbells and other equipment and received a generous credit from Amy and Direct Fitness Solutions (even though much of the equipment was over a decade old!)

We added into the room 13 self-contained lifting rack systems, brand new dumbbells, kettlebells, medicine balls, barbells, hex bars, push sleds, new treadmill and a 25 yard section of astroturf.

How the Room Functions now
With 7 racks aligning the west wall and 6 racks aligning the east wall, the turf lies in the middle between the two sections.

The north end of the room consists of a dumbbell section, kettlebells and med balls.

The room now functions as an open space “Sports Performance Room” where we can simultaneously train strength and movement-based skills in one setting.

Each rack is now set to accommodate 3-4 athletes at once, allowing for more training flexibility. The turf in the center of the room can be used for warm up, mobility, and speed/conditioning work and so much more. The dumbbell section acts as its own training section, giving us a total of four training areas in one room

Whereas the old set up limited how many athletes we could train at once and even what we did, we now can train multiple athletes and teams at one time efficiently and effectively!

Programming
With the added space and functionality, Daimond, the football coaches, and the athletic department added programming to the summer with middle school speed agility and lifting happening two nights a week all summer. Additionally, Daimond will partner with GRCMS PE to do speed and agility units for fitness. These two program additions will help increase comfort and education around sport performance for GRCMS families and strengthen the tie between high school and middle school for retention and program building.

Big thanks to everyone who helped make this project possible! Grand Rapids Christian Sports just got better!

Check out the fast-action renovation video on Instagram!