A member pushes through the door on a Tuesday evening, glances at the laminated timetable taped beside the entrance, and asks at the desk anyway — because there's a pen line through the spin class and nobody's sure whether the replacement instructor is still coming. That question gets asked all day, in every studio. Meanwhile there's a TV already mounted above the desk playing a channel nobody chose, and two more on the cardio wall doing nothing at all.

Gym digital signage is mostly about closing that gap: putting the schedule you already maintain onto the screens you already own, and making it change itself when you move a class. This guide covers what belongs on the front-desk screen, what belongs on the floor, how to run one loop for the morning crowd and another for the evening one, and how a multi-location chain pushes a single schedule to every site.

The class schedule already lives in a spreadsheet — let it drive the wall

Most studios keep the timetable in one of two places: a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds every season, or the booking system.

If it's a spreadsheet. Import the CSV or Excel file and it becomes a live table on the screen — class, time, studio, instructor. When the timetable changes, you edit the file you already have, re-import it, and every screen showing that table updates on its own within about a minute. Dates render in the viewer's language, and the columns you keep for yourself — room capacity, pay rates, internal notes — never leave the dashboard. Accepted formats are .xlsx, .xls, .ods, .csv and .tsv, so whatever your timetable is already saved as will almost certainly go straight in.

If it lives in the booking calendar. Connect a Google or Outlook calendar — or paste the booking system's iCal link — and the wall shows today's and upcoming classes. Move a class, the wall moves. Nobody retypes anything, and the wall and the booking system can't drift apart, because they're reading the same calendar.

Either way, the printed sheet stops being the thing that lies to members. The spreadsheet or the calendar becomes the remote control for every screen in the building, and you keep working in the tool you were already working in.

What to put on the front-desk screen

This is the screen a member reads while they're scanning in, so it should answer the questions the desk gets asked most:

• Today's classes, in order, with the studio and the instructor — the single item that removes the most desk interruptions.
• The next class starting, called out larger than the rest, so somebody walking in knows whether they have time to change.
• Trainer of the day — a photo, a name, what they're on the floor for, and when they're available. It's the cheapest introduction you'll ever run between a member and a coach.
• Membership and program information — what's included, how to book, how to freeze or transfer. Written once, on screen forever, instead of explained again at the desk every shift.
• Closures, holiday hours and room changes. These are the announcements that generate complaints when they're missed, and they're a one-line edit from a phone.
• A clock, in its own zone alongside everything else. Sounds trivial; it's the reason people look up at the screen at all.

You don't have to pick between these. A multi-zone layout runs the schedule table in the main area, a promo strip along the bottom, and the clock in a corner, each playing its own content independently.

Floor screens: what people read between sets

The screens on the cardio wall and in the free-weight area have a different job. Nobody stands and studies them — they get glanced at, repeatedly, by somebody who is already a member and already in the building.

• Off-peak class promotion. The mid-morning and mid-afternoon slots are the ones with room in them, and the people best placed to fill them are standing right there. Nothing else in your marketing reaches them at that moment.
• Form and technique cues your own coaches wrote. A short, silent loop of the cues they're tired of repeating, in your own words and your own branding.
• Interval and circuit content. Upload the timing video your coaches already use for a circuit and put it on a loop on the screen beside the rig, so nobody's squinting at a phone on the floor.
• Challenge boards and community results. A leaderboard, a photo from the weekend event, the name of whoever finished the challenge. This is the content members actually stop for.
• New equipment and new classes. The rower that arrived last week, the class launching Monday — announced where the people who'd sign up are standing.
• Everything silent. Floor screens compete with music and machines. Assume no sound, put every word on screen, and design for a glance from across the room.

Morning crowd, evening crowd: one screen, two personalities

The people in your gym before work are not the people in it after work, and they don't need the same screen. Scheduling lets one display run a different loop by time of day and by day of week, in your own timezone, with nobody touching anything.

A pattern that works in most studios:

• Early morning — today's schedule up top, express and short-format classes promoted, quiet and information-dense. This crowd is on a clock.
• Mid-morning and afternoon — the off-peak push. Classes with space, personal-training availability, the community board. This is the window where a screen genuinely changes the shape of the day.
• Evening — the busiest hours. Next class starting, studio and instructor, plus whatever you're launching. Keep the loop short; people are moving.
• After close — a clean closed-hours slide, or your hours and how to join, for anybody walking past the window.

Set it once and it repeats every week. The only time you touch it again is when the timetable itself changes — and if the schedule is coming from the spreadsheet or the calendar, that part is already handled.

More than one location, one schedule

Chains and multi-site studios have the version-control problem in its worst form: every site keeps its own printed sheet, every sheet is wrong in a different way, and head office has no way to know.

Screens are grouped in the dashboard, so a brand-level announcement — a new class format, a holiday schedule, a challenge running across all sites — is published once and lands everywhere. Site-specific content stays site-specific: each location's own schedule table, its own instructors, its own closures. What you get is one place to look and one place to change things, instead of a phone call per site.

And all of it works from a phone. A closure at one location on a Saturday morning is a thing you fix from the parking lot, not something that waits until somebody's at a desk on Monday.

When the Wi-Fi drops mid-class

Gyms are hostile to wireless networks — steel, concrete, mirrors, and a room full of bodies and phones. Any screen you put on the floor will lose its connection at some point.

Each screen keeps a local copy of its content, so a dropped connection never means a blank display. The schedule table keeps showing the last version it received instead of going dark; the loop keeps looping. If the player restarts entirely — a power cut, or its own recovery — it comes back showing content without needing the network at all. It reconnects and catches up on its own within about a minute, so nobody has to walk over to the cardio wall with a remote. Optional alerts email you the moment a screen does go offline, so you hear about it before a member mentions it at the desk.

Screens in French first, for Québec studios

If you're running a gym in Québec, the screens on the wall need to work in French, and so does the tool your staff use to change them. The dashboard is available in French, English, Spanish and Romanian, chosen per user — so your front-desk staff work in French while a coach who prefers English gets the same dashboard in English. Screen content follows the same logic: a schedule table renders its dates in the language you're publishing in, and a French-first loop is the default you set up, not a translation you bolt on afterward.

How to set it up

You don't need new TVs, and you don't need a media player per screen.

1. Pick a player for the screens you already have. If a TV runs Android TV 7.0+, install the free WeDisplay app straight onto it. If it doesn't, a small Android TV stick in an HDMI port does the same job. A Windows PC installs it with one command using the browser that's already on the machine. A Raspberry Pi (Pi 4 recommended) also installs with one command, is silent, and hides behind the screen. If you want the hardware options compared properly, our guide to turning a TV into a digital sign walks through each route.
2. Pair it. The player shows a short code on screen; you enter that code in the dashboard. The whole thing takes about a minute.
3. Load the schedule. Import the timetable spreadsheet, or connect the booking calendar.
4. Build the layout. Schedule table, promo strip, clock — one zone each.
5. Set the dayparts. Morning, off-peak, evening, closed, by day of week in your own timezone.
6. Add the second screen once the first one has proved itself — usually the point where members stop asking the desk what time spin is.

The free plan covers one screen, with no card and no time limit, so the honest way to evaluate this is to put it on the TV above the front desk for a couple of weeks and see whether the question stops getting asked. The live membership table from a spreadsheet comes with the paid plans, switched on for your account.

Where to go next

If you want the gym-specific version of all of this — the screens, the schedule, the floor, laid out by room — see digital signage for gyms and fitness studios. And if you just want to try it on the one TV above the desk before you commit to anything, start with a lobby TV on the free plan and pair it tonight.