Every multifamily developer planning their 2028 amenity package faces two main conflicts.
On one hand, fitness amenities are no longer optional at market-rate properties. According to a Greystar survey of renters, 83% of participants consider them important or essential. But what renters expect from those spaces keeps evolving with fitness trends.
On the other hand, developers have to make many of the biggest decisions, like where the fitness space goes, how large it is and often how much it can cost, a year or more before the building opens. By the time renter expectations come into focus, the footprint is fixed and the budget may already be under pressure.
If your team is still determining what level of fitness amenity fits the property, The Complete Fitness Amenity Playbook for Multifamily Housing can help frame that decision by property type, resident expectations and amenity tier. This article focuses on the next question: which early planning decisions should be protected so the room can adapt over time?
Future-proofing a fitness amenity does not start with the final equipment list. It starts when the room is located, sized and coordinated with architecture, interiors, electrical, mechanical and construction plans.
That early coordination matters because many of the most common fitness room problems are difficult to fix later. Frequently, decisions that seemed minor during the design can later limit equipment selection, installation, resident experience or future updates. That is why future readiness is often shaped before the final equipment list is ever created.
For example, power is often treated as solved once outlets appear in the right general location. In reality, treadmill circuits, future cardio needs and connected console choices may require more planning. A room that works for today’s equipment package may become harder to update later if power and data are only planned for the original layout.
Ceiling height creates a similar issue. Taller cardio pieces, lighting fixtures, sprinkler heads and ceiling treatments all need to be considered before the room is built. If the room is designed with only minimum clearance in mind, certain equipment may be difficult or impossible to include later.
The same is true for access. Freight elevators, double doors into the fitness room and the path equipment must take through the building can all affect installation. These details are easy to overlook during design and frustrating to solve once product is ready to ship.
Residents increasingly expect their building to include a fitness amenity, especially at market-rate and higher-positioned properties. That makes the fitness room less of a simple yes-or-no feature and more of a reflection of how well the property understands its residents.
The opportunity to differentiate is not just having a fitness center. It is creating one that feels current, intuitive and useful for the way residents actually train. When the space matches the property’s positioning and resident expectations, it becomes more than an expected amenity. It becomes part of the leasing story and resident experience.
Strength, free-weight and functional training play a larger role in how residents exercise than they did five years ago. The shift extends well beyond bodybuilding or any one region of the country. According to The New York Times, about one in three Americans now practice strength training regularly.
That does not mean reducing the cardio offering. Cardio remains one of the most accessible and heavily used parts of a fitness room, and residents rely on it for endurance work, conditioning and interval sessions. The goal is a better balance between cardio and strength, not a trade-off between them.
Strength training, however, requires more deliberate planning. Developers need to account for adequate floor space, weight storage, circulation and progression. A key example is offering enough weight increments to serve residents at different ability levels.
Functional training and mobility or recovery also depend on space that is easy to lose during planning. If every square foot is filled with equipment, residents may have nowhere to warm up, stretch, follow a digital workout, use accessories or move through a circuit without crossing the room. The room may look complete on paper but still fail to accommodate the way residents actually train.
A flexible fitness room starts with a clear understanding of the core workout behaviors it needs to support. Across property types, the most flexible fitness amenities account for cardio, strength, functional training, and mobility and recovery. Trends may change, but these behaviors give developers a practical way to plan for how residents are likely to move, train and recover over time.
Not every trend holds. Some categories draw significant investment and turn out to serve a narrower group of residents than expected, and square footage committed to them is hard to reclaim.
Flexibility is the smart hedge. Before committing significant square footage to a single category, it is worth asking what else the space could hold in five years. In practice, flexibility often comes down to practical decisions made early:
These choices do not lock the property into a single trend. They create room for the fitness amenity to evolve as resident expectations change.
The visible experience depends on infrastructure that prospects may never consciously notice. Touchscreen equipment, energetic music, bright lighting and entertainment displays all require the right systems behind the scenes.
That means planning early for ceiling height and acoustics, access to natural light, strong Wi-Fi, sufficient electrical capacity and a robust sound system. These elements may be less visible than the equipment itself, but when they are missing or inadequate, residents are more likely to notice.
Matrix Fitness teams also see several infrastructure-related details create challenges after the layout or construction plan is locked. When infrastructure decisions are addressed late, teams may have to compromise the layout, equipment mix, user experience or installation plan.
Interior coordination is especially important. A fitness room may be designed beautifully, but artwork, millwork, lighting fixtures, mirrors, countertops or other design elements can limit where equipment can go. When fitness planning happens separately from interior design, the final room can require compromise that would have been easier to avoid earlier.
The room’s mechanical design also matters. Fitness spaces need to stay comfortable when multiple residents are training. Airflow, ventilation, temperature and odor control affect whether the space feels fresh and usable or crowded and uncomfortable.
Fitness trends are not included here because you need to chase every new workout, product or wellness feature. They matter because they signal how residents may expect to use the fitness amenity by the time the building opens.
For developers, the practical takeaway is to understand which trends may affect space, infrastructure and flexibility before those decisions become difficult to change.
Emerging fitness and wellness trends may have a role in the right property, but they should not automatically drive the room design. The planning question is not whether every trend belongs in every building. It is whether the room can adapt if a trend becomes relevant to the residents the property serves.
Mobility and recovery should be planned as part of the core fitness room, with floor space and accessories residents can use to warm up, stretch and cool down. Higher-investment recovery features such as saunas, cold plunges, red-light therapy or massage chairs may add value at the right property, but they should be evaluated separately from the core fitness room so they do not consume space or budget that the broader resident base needs.
Body composition analysis is another example. Adoption is early enough that it may not justify the investment on a project delivering soon, but the planning question is separable from the purchasing one. These units have a modest footprint and need power, a network connection and a position in the room with some privacy. Confirming the space can accommodate one later costs practically nothing at the design stage but is awkward to arrange once the room is built.
The same principle applies across emerging trends: avoid overbuilding around a single idea, but protect the space, infrastructure and flexibility that make future updates possible.
For student housing, the question is no longer simply whether to offer a fitness center. Apartments.com found that 23% of student renters consider an onsite fitness center or gym a must-have.
At the same time, NAA’s owner/operator research suggests fitness spaces are being evaluated by the quality of the equipment, technology/connectivity, space planning and security, with 95.4% of respondents calling state-of-the-art equipment key for new-construction fitness centers.
Student housing creates an annual competitive reset. Each incoming class brings new expectations shaped by the latest fitness and wellness trends, requiring operators and developers to track those shifts and make more frequent updates.
That makes flexibility especially important. Student residents may expect a fitness experience that feels closer to a full gym, campus recreation center or boutique-style training space than a traditional apartment fitness room. Virtual training, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), wellness spaces and higher-end amenities may become part of the comparison set faster in student housing than in other multifamily environments.
Parents may also influence the leasing decision, especially when they co-sign or help pay for rent. For them, the fitness room can signal more than convenience. It can help communicate that the property supports student wellness, safety, lifestyle and value beyond the unit itself.
For developers, the fitness room has to keep earning its value with each new class of residents.
Will this fitness amenity still support the way residents want to train when the building opens and as expectations continue to change?
The answer depends less on predicting every future trend and more on how much adaptability was protected before the room was built.
A room that is undersized, overfilled, poorly coordinated or too dependent on one narrow trend has few options once the walls are built, the budget is locked and the equipment package is approved. That is why early planning matters.
Matrix Fitness works with developers, architects and design teams across market segments and budgets, often before a project breaks ground. That work can include layout review, equipment planning, technology and service strategy, all centered on a practical question: how do you create the experience residents expect within the space and budget the project actually has?
By combining multifamily market experience with lessons from past installations, Matrix Fitness helps project teams make those decisions earlier and with greater confidence.