The Best Flooring Options for Your Home Gym – Buyers Guide

The most popular home gym flooring is rubber (Source). Rubber flooring is relatively cheap, easy to work with, easy to clean and can last for a long, long time. Because of this, you will notice that nearly every gym you go to will have rubber flooring. Rubber flooring should be at least 8mm thick to be able to handle the high traffic and stress of dropping weights.

Why gym flooring is important

Home gym flooring may be the most important part of your home gym. Your gym flooring gets a ton of wear and tear because it is used or involved in every exercise. Having good flooring is also a key to help you stay injury-free.

You want to choose a flooring type that protects the sub-floor and protects your joints from the impact of exercise. 

The regular flooring in your house isn’t designed to withstand the forces of working out. Standard home floors are hard and don’t have much ‘give’ to them. The lack of give places high stresses on your bones and joints. Dumbbells and barbells will crack and break down too if the floor isn’t energy absorptive.

At the end of the day, you want a home gym you can be proud of (and show off on social media).

Having the right flooring not only helps you get the most out of your home gym, it helps to make it look great. The floor of your gym is the part of your gym that takes up the most area, so having it look nice will give you pride. And the nicer your home gym is, the more you’ll want to use it. The more you use your home gym, the more gains you will see. The more gains you see, the more likely you are to stick to your training.

Check out my article here on how to set up your sets and reps to get the most gains.

What gym flooring should be made of

The most common flooring in gyms (commercial and home gyms) is rubber tiles or rolls. Rubber flooring comes in a number of thicknesses, and some are even specifically designed to reduce the stress on bones and joints associated with high impact workouts. With rubber flooring, you have the choice of tiles or rolls.

Rubber tiles fit can be put together very quickly because they fit together like puzzle pieces. They offer great durability and shock absorption but are more expensive than rubber roles. 

Rubber rolls are long (25 or 50 feet) and wide (4 feet) rolls of material that you then need to cut to fit your space.

Rubber rolls can help create a great aesthetic for your home gym. You can hardly see where different sections of the rubber meet, which makes it smooth. But because the roles are so big, they’re extremely heavy and can be difficult to work with. You definitely need some friends to help you. Rolls can also be very expensive to ship.

In addition to rubber flooring, you can also choose from foam padding, regular carpet, turf, and vinyl. But rubber flooring stands above the rest in terms of popularity and performance. 

Why rubber is the best option for home gym floors

There’s a reason why almost any gym you walk into will have some type of rubber flooring where people are working out. Rubber flooring is hands down the best option for flooring in your home gym.

Once you install rubber flooring in your home gym, you won’t have to worry about it for years. Whether you are doing CrossFit type workouts, powerlifting, weightlifting or HIIT training rubber floors are able to handle the abuse day after day. 

Rubber flooring is also very safe. Because of the grip that comes with rubber flooring, any equipment you have (treadmills, squat racks, rowing machines, etc.) won’t move around if they’re on rubber flooring. Also, when your lifting weights or moving around the rubber flooring gives your shoes a good grip and base of support with the floor. This will give you confidence as you move through your workout, whether it’s with multiple hundreds of pounds above your head or when doing burpees. 

Another key to rubber flooring is that it just looks good. Whether you pick tiles or long rolls of rubber, you can get a number of colours or patterns to make your home gym custom. Also, there are no seams in the flooring, which makes the flooring look clean and continuous throughout (and helps with safety!).

Finally, rubber flooring is easy to clean. Whether you use a mop and soapy water or a cleaning spray it is easy to clean up the sweat and grossness that comes with working out. Rubber flooring can also be cleaned with a shop-vac making it easy to clean up spills, like the dreaded dropped chalk bucket or protein shake.

Because it is easy to clean, rubber flooring will help to keep you safe from infections.

If you’re wondering why people use chalk in the gym, check out my article about it here

Do you need to put flooring over concrete in a home gym?

Concrete floors are often the default surface in basements or garages. Because most home gyms are found in the basements or garages, it can be tempting to simply lift on the concrete floor, but it is not a great idea.

Concrete subfloors are able to handle the weight of exercise equipment and the dropping of heavy barbells and dumbbells. However, the concrete subfloor isn’t very good at absorbing the energy associated with working out. Having a bare subfloor will increase the wear and tear on your equipment, even if you are dropping bumper plates.

This means you will need to replace your equipment more frequently – driving up the cost associated with having a home gym.

Having concrete as the base under your home gym flooring is the best option. You get the best of both worlds with the strength of the concrete acting as the base for your home gym. Plus you get an absorptive material on top of the concrete to help protect your joints, equipment, and the foundation of your house from damage.

How thick should home gym flooring be

Once you’ve decided on your gym floor material, you need to decide on how thick your flooring should be.

The consensus is that gym flooring should be at least 8mm thick if you want to protect your subfloor from the stresses of your workouts. 

If you are simply going to be doing one workout a day in your home gym and you are not lifting (and dropping) crazy heavy weights, 8mm thick flooring is probably enough. Most commercial gyms use 8mm thick floors. 

If you are going to be training with a bunch of friends, working out multiple times a day or dropping heavy weights from above your head you should probably bump up the thickness to 3/8”. 

3/8” is the standard thickness that you would find in a weightlifting or CrossFit gym. 3/8″ will protect your subfloor even if you drop 300lbs from above your head and it is still affordable enough to make sense in a home gym.

If you really want to, you can go with gym flooring that is 1/2″ but it really isn’t necessary. It won’t provide much more protection for your floor than the 3/8” thick flooring but it is a lot more expensive. I would only recommend 1/2″ flooring if you are running a weightlifting club out of your home gym and will have multiple people dropping 300+lbs on the floor all day every day.

Special considerations for home gym flooring

Regardless of whether you choose to go with rubber flooring for your home gym or some other alternative, you really need to consider the safety, thickness and how easy the flooring is to clean if you want a good looking and well-performing home gym.

Safety

Your number one priority when working out should be safety. What’s the point of training if it just leads to you getting hurt and not enjoying life?

Although it is often overlooked, the flooring in your gym is a big aspect of staying safe. The gym floor is the barrier between your body and the hard subfloor (concrete), so it needs to absorb energy and be forgiving enough for you to do exercises on the floor.

That’s one of the reasons why rubber flooring is key, it can absorb high energy activities like jumps or dropping weights. The last thing you want is for a dropped dumbbell or barbell to bounce around once it hits the ground – potentially landing on a toe or on another piece of equipment. Rubber flooring is also kind enough on the body to not cause damage when doing sit ups or burpees.

Thickness 

As mentioned previously, the thickness is key when it comes to your home gym flooring protecting you, your equipment and the base flooring underneath the home gym. You really want a Goldilocks floor – not too thick and not too thin. Whether your workouts are machine-based or CrossFit-style, you really can’t go wrong with 8mm or 3/8” flooring.

Ease of cleaning

One overlooked aspect of gym flooring is how easy it is to clean. When you work out you sweat (a lot), and the build-up of sweat in a gym can be gross. We have all been to commercial gyms where equipment has a funky smell and a bit of a film of sweat/grossness on it. Even if you’re the only one using your home gym, you don’t want that.

Keeping the floor of your home gym free of bacteria, mold, and grit helps to keep you safe from illness and injury. 

You want your home gym to be made of a material that is anti-bacterial, easy to wipe down or mop-up, and capable of being vacuumed. 

No matter how careful you are things will be spilled, little rocks will end up everywhere and you’ll have to spend time cleaning your floor. You want this to be an easy task so that you do it regularly (after every workout) and it isn’t a chore.

Rubber flooring checks all the boxes on this and that is why I recommend it to everyone starting a home gym.

If you are just starting a home gym and wondering what equipment you should buy first, check out my guide here.

How much home gym flooring costs