With anxiety slowing down his gym grind, Karim Ismail created a digital map of the Carleton University’s fitness centre to make it a less intimidating space. Now, he hopes to turn it into a business.
The business master’s student and graduate of Carleton’s engineering program merged his two backgrounds to create a website laying out the location and names of all the machines in Carleton’s gym.
Ismail called it “Fit Map,” which currently only works on mobile through the link found here and Carleton’s subreddit. He said there’s a lack of direction when students arrive to work out, especially first-timers to the gym.
“There’s a step missing between when you first enter … and then when you start working out. There should be an intro, like, ‘Here’s where all the machines are,’” Ismail said.
“Every time I’d go to a new gym, I’d wish I had a map of the gym. So I was like, ‘Why not do it myself’?”
With that in mind, Ismail designed Fit Map to help people reach their fitness goals, especially those who are anxious to start their fitness journey.
“If you go at the busy times, you feel like everyone’s kind of looking [at you], but in reality, probably no one is,” he said. “It’s all in your head, but makes you averse to exploring. You don’t want to look, you just want to stick with what you know and it hinders your progress.”
Ismail said Fit Map could mitigate that fear. He suggested the scenario where a gym user’s favourite fitness machine is occupied, leaving them wondering what alternative machines they could use.
“Instead of walking around and feeling weird, just open the map, be like, ‘Here’s the one that I want, where’s another one that looks like it?’ and go from there.”
“If I had something like that, it would make my life so much easier,” she said.
“If I’m looking around to see what [machine] does what and looking at the instructions, I feel like I look weird,” Bohl-Martinez said.
Lucas Hiscocks, a first-year mechanical engineering student, said he was overwhelmed without a way to navigate the Carleton Athletics gym and instead stuck to the smaller Prescott House gym for residence students.
“It’s hard to make that first step and set your foot in there in the first place,” Hiscocks said. “Until you have someone or something to actually introduce you, such as an online map, then it’s kind of difficult for someone who hasn’t really been to the gym before.”
Hiscocks said he now uses Fit Map to help plan his workout at the larger Carleton gym by looking at the number of machines in the gym to predict potential wait times.
Ismail said his next step is to launch a business using Fit Map as a prototype. His goal is to have a partner to sign on and expand the website to off-campus gyms.
Last summer, Ismail emailed Carleton Athletics, hoping to implement it on campus.
On Feb 27, Ismail posted Fit Map on Carleton’s subreddit and received around 117 upvotes and many comments expressing interest, prompting him to reach out to Carleton Athletics again.
Ismail has since launched a GymMaps subreddit, posting updates on the new features of Fit Map. Since his original post, Ismail’s added a similar machine button and muscle icons to show what part of the body the machine works on.
Ismail said he’s still figuring out the details of his long-term plan.
“We clearly hit a pain point that a lot of people have, so we’ll see.”
Featured image by Kyla Silva.
