SCHOOL WEIGHT ROOM PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE

Having students participate in a fitness program can offer them many benefits including more stamina, stronger muscles and bones, less susceptibility to depression and disease, etc. In general, it can improve their mental and physical health and help them to be better athletes, regardless of their sport of choice.

However, the director of the weight room can contribute to opposite results, if the students, who use the fitness equipment are injured due to the equipment being neglected. Serious injuries or even death can result from poorly maintained fitness equipment. On strength equipment, cables can break or jam, welds can fail. Treadmills can suddenly speed up tossing the user backwards or suddenly stop, in effect, propelling the user forward. Dusty motor compartments can cause fires. Frayed wires can cause electrical shock, cracked covers on the equipment can cut skin, loose covers can come off exposing moving parts, seats can get wobbly and cause back problems due to misalignment of the body in order to compensate, etc.

Even the best exercise equipment requires preventive maintenance to keep it safe and functioning properly, but in a high school weight room we have additional factors that can contribute to equipment failures. For one thing, for most of the students the school weight room is where they have their first encounter with and specialized single station strength equipment and other commercial grade fitness equipment. That is a positive experience for them, but it is often a time when the equipment is used incorrectly. For example, oftentimes, students will stand in front of a lat pull down machine and pull the lat bar down on an angle or off to one side or the other, rather than sit on the seat and pull the lat bar straight down. Using the lat pull down unit incorrectly can cause the cable to rub against a frame piece or the sides of the top pulley and cause the cable to fray and break. Also, not knowing any better, they frequently do very fast repetitions with very light weights on the single station strength units or the multi-station gyms, which causes the cables to derail, get jammed and fray or break.

Unfortunately, another factor is intentional damage to the equipment; sabotage, done by one or more students. Additionally, if more experienced users of a typical fitness center notice that something is wrong with a piece of fitness equipment, they are likely to bring it to attention of management. Students are less likely to recognize that equipment even has a defect or the significance of the defect, until it has reached a point of catastrophic failure, when an injury that could have been avoided often results.

A preventive maintenance program is an essential tool in the athletic director's or fitness director's tool box to keep the equipment safe for the students to use and to help them get the most out of the school's fitness and conditioning programs. For a maintenance program to be most effective, it should be conducted by a fitness equipment service company with experience in high school weight rooms preventive maintenance.