Home Gym Rubber Flooring Guide

The Ultimate Guide To Home Gym Rubber Flooring

Home gym flooring gets a lot of searches online for good reason, it can be a really expensive project to protect your floor from dropped weights. Like I mentioned before, our basement floor is concrete, you don’t necessarily want to be dropping weights on a concrete floor because something has to give….either the plate, your bar or the floor. If you have wood floors then this problem is compounded.

There are a few ways that you can protect your floor from abuse while you train. First, consider your training style. Originally, I wanted to operate off one sole platform for everything. This basically implies that you will squat bench and pull from the same space. I decided that this would leave an already small space very cramped. Plus, it leaves no room for accessory work if you have a training partner. If you don’t have a training partner then this might be the best option for you. Likewise, if you have little space then this will have to be how you get the job done. If that is the case then skip right to our DIY platform guide.

Home Gym Flooring Options

You basically have two options for flooring, rolled rubber that you can lay down, or the puzzle piece garage flooring that I ended up purchasing. In both cases, they WILL NOT protect the floor from damage. I used this option solely for our squat/bench station as a way to get traction and keep the dust and dirt at bay. Here is what we went with.

Rolled Rubber Vs. Puzzle Pieces For Your Home Gym

Here is an interesting story that actually made part of my decision in how to install flooring for our basement gym.  I initially went to tractor supply to get both rolled rubber and horse mats.  Here are the horse mats just for reference.

Thickness

The horse mats are 3/4″ vs the 1/4″ mats of either rolled rubber or puzzle pieces.  This makes the horse mats ideal for a deadlift platform, I felt that they were just too big of a pain in the ass to put under the power rack.  Yes, they will work but they don’t offer the same options for utilizing floor space and square footage by changing how you put them together.  Horse mats are fairly easy to cut with a utility knife….but not so easy that I would want to do it multiple times.

So, when I went to get rubber flooring for both a deadlift platform and the actual surface of our floor the sales associate REFUSED to sell me a roll of rubber flooring.  She was adamant that they rubber flooring would rip and not protect the floor.  This was odd and I explained that I really didn’t care, I just needed to cover up the bare concrete.  Either way, she wasn’t having it and I didn’t feel the need to present a case just to buy the stuff.  I just grabbed the stall mats and left.

This ended up being a blessing in disguise because the next day we went to get the rest of the materials for our DIY deadlift platform from home depot.  We started looking around the garage flooring section and grabbed the puzzle pieces.  This let us set up a rectangle to cover just the surface under the squat stand and that was it.  I am really happy with how it worked out for a few reasons.

• We get occasional water in the basement, we can move the tiles to clean if need be
• Should be we want to expand later we can with more puzzle pieces
• The tiles have a rough surface that makes it much easier to get traction for leg drive etc

I don’t believe it is cost effective to completely cover the surface that you will train in with rubber. Save your money for the actual equipment and make due with these suggestions.  Here is the final setup

​Final Thoughts

Get an idea of your square footage for training and then get a LITTLE BIT MORE. That is it. This isn’t rocket science and the stuff is expensive.

Pro tip: Look at home depot/tractor supply for this stuff rather than a fitness retailer. It is the same material but way cheaper.

 

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