Three Ways to Make your Gym more Accessible for Adaptive Athletes
When most people think about accessibility compliance they think about mobility-based laws, like ramps, which are governed by the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) or Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). But, there are many other ways you can easily make your gym more inviting and inclusive for all athletes that are often overlooked.
Here are three things you can do today to re-organize your equipment and make your gym more accessible for athletes with disabilities.
Place Equipment at Varying Heights
Try this: Grab a chair and take it on a tour of your gym to see if you can reach all of the equipment from a seated position…and not just the 5lb weights on the bottom shelf!
Can you Reach the Top Row of Medicine Balls?
Affiliates often organize equipment by weight — lighter on top and heaviest on the bottom. This makes sense as far as ease of lifting the weight, but it may make it so that not everyone can reach the weight they need. This is very common with medicine balls but could happen with just about any piece of equipment, including dumbbells, kettlebells and slam balls.
How to fix it: Re-organize the equipment so that there’s a variety of weights at all heights. Think vertical organization rather than horizontal. The typical guidance is to have a 48-inch accessible reach range, with the bottom no lower than 15 inches. Not only will your athletes in wheelchairs appreciate the change, but your shorter athletes will also love you as well.
Aldridge: “Definitely the hardest thing I do in a CrossFit gym is not the exercise, but trying to pull the plates off of one of those weight trees!”
How to fix it: Don’t use vertical plate stackers or stack your plates on the ground. Instead opt for a horizontal stack or shelf system, or add a couple of horizontal plate storage pins on your rig.
Stay tuned every week for more accessibility and inclusion-focused guidance from Adaptive Training Academy. Next week we’ll continue with tips on how to make your affiliate more accessible.