After a long day of classes, you make your way to RIMAC, hoping to squeeze in a quick workout between commitments. Finding space isn’t easy: Peak hours mean busy lines, limited equipment, and adjusting your workout on the fly. Still, you learned how to plan around these inconveniences.
In Fall 2025, UC San Diego began construction on the RIMAC expansion project, closing off nearly a third of the gym and its machines. Now, you walk into a packed weight room with blocked-off spaces and missing equipment, and you have to rethink your workout before it even begins. For many students, this has become a normal part of going to the campus’s premier gym.
RIMAC’s expansion aims to reduce overcrowding and improve student wellness. But right now, it’s doing neither. Usable gym space has shrunk even as demand remains high, concentrating more students into fewer available areas and worsening congestion in the short term. The expansion focuses on enlarging a single facility rather than improving recreation spaces across campus, which overlooks why RIMAC feels overcrowded in the first place. While the project promises larger facilities, upgraded equipment, and new activity spaces, it does not address the fact that most students still rely on the same gym.
Students’ reliance on RIMAC is what drives its overcrowding issue. RIMAC has always attracted larger crowds because, for a lot of students, it is the only campus gym that fully supports their workouts. Smaller gyms on campus don’t have the necessary equipment and machines to support a range of training, from cardio to power lifting. Expanding RIMAC doesn’t solve that problem; it just makes a bigger version of the same crowded space.
Even once construction is finally complete, it’s hard to tell whether it will actually solve overcrowding. Though the project will upgrade equipment and workout spaces, it still places all of its improvements in a single gym rather than improving other gyms on campus. For example, the planned climbing wall expands activity options at RIMAC, even though UCSD already has a dedicated climbing gym on campus. Expanding one gym might help increase variety, but it doesn’t do much to reduce the number of students who depend on RIMAC every day.
Second-year Briyitte Montalvo is just one student facing RIMAC’s overcrowding issue. When changing her timing didn’t work, she tried to alternate between going to RIMAC and other campus gyms, but found that the alternatives lacked the resources she needed.
“I had a gap between classes and thought I could beat the crowd, but everyone was already there,” Montalvo said. “I stopped going to Main Gym because there’s no point in me going. They don’t have hip thrust machines. Last time I went, they didn’t even have the bar pads either.”
This readjustment has just become a part of the on-campus gym experience. As our access to amenities decreases, recreation fees stay the same, meaning that students are paying for facilities that are smaller, more crowded, and harder to use.
UCSD should instead focus on increasing the quality of recreation spaces on campus rather than concentrating all resources in one “main” gym. By upgrading smaller gyms with similar equipment to RIMAC, demand would be more evenly distributed across campus.
RIMAC may soon be larger and newer, but unless campus recreation focuses on student needs and expands beyond one space, the overcrowded experience will most likely stay the same. The goal shouldn’t just be building a bigger gym — it should be creating a campus where students don’t all need to use the same one.
