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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Fitness studio

Acoustic panels for fitness studios: the complete guide

What makes fitness studios noisy, which panels fix it, and how to plan treatment from start to finish.

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Instructors can be heard over the music without a painful room. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In fitness studios the main sound sources are loud music, the instructor and equipment, and the most common complaints are that music and instructor microphone fight each other, weights and impact noise carry downstairs, and that mirrors and hard floors reflect everything.

What is going wrong in the room

Every hard surface reflects sound. When a room has a lot of them, each sound keeps bouncing for a long time and overlaps the next one. That build-up is called reverberation, and it is measured as RT60: the time it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. A typical fitness studio of 40 × 30 ft with a 12 ft ceiling has a volume of about 14,400 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 3.46 seconds. The target for fitness studios is 0.80 seconds.

What panels can and cannot do

  • Panels can shorten reverberation, remove flutter echo, make speech clearer and lower the overall noise level that builds up in the room.
  • Panels cannot stop sound passing through walls, floors or doors. That is soundproofing, which needs mass, airtightness and isolation. See soundproofing and STC for fitness studios.

The recommended starting point

For a fitness studio like the one above, we suggest about 60 48 × 24 in rectangular baffle, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.80 s. That is roughly 29% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for fitness studios is about 40% on walls and 60% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our fitness studio solutions page.

Plan it in five steps

  1. Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
  2. Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for fitness studios.
  3. Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
  4. Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
  5. Check the fire and code requirements before you order.

Guides for fitness studios