BYU Weight Room has got to grow

I like to workout, but I’m not a ‘gym bro’ by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t take protein powder or chug pre-workout. I’ve never owned a muscle tee or even a tank top. However, BYU needs to expand their weightlifting facilities—desperately.

In theory, the student weight room is 6,000 square feet. In practice, a full half of the gym is closed Monday-Thursday for SWELL classes. The weight room is essentially split in two right down the middle, with the check-in desk straddling the border and a door keeping students out of the SWELL side. Prior to the pandemic, students could use both halves of the gym so long as a class was not in session. Now, students can only use the full gym on Fridays and Saturdays.

Not that you would want to be in the BYU gym if it were at its full occupancy. Beginning in the late afternoon and carrying into the evening, the weight room is swarming with students trying to get their cardio or pump in. Most machines are taken, real estate in the free weight section is hard to come by, and there is a literal line to use one of the seven power racks in the north half of the gym. 

BYU’s weight room is uncharacteristically small for a school with 34 thousand students. BYU-Idaho, with a student body of only 25 thousand, has significantly larger facilities. I wasn’t able to find square footage, but going by the college tour I did on BYU-Idaho campus, and a promotional video on their site, I would guess their weight room is at least twice the size of the full BYU weight room—including the south half of the BYU gym that is typically closed.

The BYU-Idaho weight room can reportedly accommodate 250 students. Assuming the average gym allocates 50 square feet per patron, the full BYU weight room would be able to accommodate a mere 120 students, and only on a Friday or Saturday when the full gym is open.

To be fair, BYU is a fiscally conservative school with a utilitarian approach to campus buildings and facilities. In addition, while BYU Idaho may have a larger weight room, there isn’t much else to do in Rexburg anyway. Provo also has more for-profit gyms in the area than Rexburg.

Still, the current strain on BYU’s weight room is clear. Exercise is important for the physical and mental health of students, and off-campus gyms are often more distant and less affordable. Providing larger weight lifting facilities on BYU campus would improve the student experience and live-up to BYU’s status as a nationally-ranked university. Finally, if the gym is hectic now, just imagine how much busier it will get as BYU expands the student body by over 3,000 students in the next six years.