Flooring For Home Gym?

Hey guys, I’ve finally moved to the suburbs and have begun building my home gym. So far I have a couple benches, bands, and DBs up to 130 (from my apartment), iron mind Vulcan squat rack and safety bars, two barbells, collars, about 700 lbs in bumper plates, etc.

My basement here is extremely nice and finished with tile flooring. In my apartment I had used a ton of yoga mats and those foam crappy pads for the floor. I really don’t want to risk damaging my floor dropping things DB benching and certainly deadlifting.

Has anyone had professional gym flooring put down in their home gym? I was considering paying a flooring company to just put 5" thick rubber flooring over my entire gym area. The only other thing I can think of is to simply buy more of the foam pads and just stack them out the ass, but I’m open to ideas if anyone has dealt with this before. Thanks in advance guys!

I would think it would be a hell of a lot cheaper to remove the tile in the lifting area and just use rubber horse Matt’s (6x4’ I believe and 3/4” thick).
I think you’d spend a ton to try and keep the tile safe and still have some risk.

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Build a platform for Deads and anything that you consider risky. If you Google “Build your own Deadlift platform” you should find a few million options. For everywhere else a horse stall mat from TSC or somewhere similar will probably get it.

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I second the horse mats like @wanna_be mention. Thats what i use in my garage gym.
You can get them in different thicknesses and dimensions

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Thanks so much for the horse stall mats, guys! Much appreciated!

Update: I ordered a ton of horse stall mats, should be here the middle of next week. For now, I’m going to use my foam padding and yoga mats.

I put the horse stall matts down in a basement room, actually turned out really nice. When you cut them, get a good t-square or straight edge you can cut against for nice straight lines. A utility knife works great, if you can spray some water on it so that it slides. Without water it binds up and sticks. If you’re putting them in a room, you can cut them to have just a small amount of interference to compress them a little, kind of helps keep everything solid and in place. Also, when carrying them downstairs try to fold in half or partially roll them up, otherwise it’s the most awkward way possible to carry 100lbs.

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