Home Gym Gets Personal

Just because you’re working up a sweat doesn’t mean you have to suffer. To keep the future owners of this 2015 Utah Valley Parade of Homes showhome inspired and on track, the home systems integration team at TYM, of Salt Lake City, made sure to pack the 200-square-foot gym with plenty of video options—but without having to hang a bunch of TVs around the room.

In this well-appointed home gym, complete with a separate bathroom and steam shower, exercise enthusiasts are able to watch as many as nine different video sources on just a single TV. A video tiling system from Savant, the SmartView, distributes video content from a well-stocked rack of gear to each of three Sony flat-panel TVs positioned strategically in the room. The SmartView system basically divides the screen of each TV into nine windows; each window can display something different from the rest. For example, one window could display a game on ESPN, while another shows a movie on HBO, a third a slideshow stored on an Apple TV unit, and so on. Whichever nine streams of video the owner chooses—accomplished easily with a few taps of a finger on the screen of a Savant iPad app—instantly appear on each of the three TVs. And in case the view of the on-screen action isn’t clear enough from a particular weight machine, any of the displays can be pulled out from the wall and swiveled 180 degrees in either direction.

Of course, such a wide assortment of video deserves equally versatile audio. To fit with the industrial design of the gym, TYM elected to mount two TruAudio speakers to the surface of the gym’s brick wall rather than flush mount them into the ceiling. When the Dads Workout button on the Savant mobile app is pressed, the speakers pull tunes from Spotify, while the TVs tune to ESPN. From this initial workout setting, a user is free to pick and choose freely from cable, satellite, Apple TV, and a Mirage Audio Server from Autonomic. While they’re setting up the workout entertainment, they can access the Savant home control app to adjust the lighting and temperature, creating a personalized exercise environment. In fact, favorite settings can be easily programmed into the Savant home control system by individual users, and these settings can be engaged from any keypad or mobile device in the house, says TYM’s Matt Montgomery. To capture a scene, he explains, a user simply sets the video, audio, lighting, and temperature to his or her liking, touches a button in the Savant mobile app, names it, and saves it. Conceivably, he says, each member of the family could create his or her own personalized workout setting, making time spent at this home gym more enjoyable and effective. EH