When you are going to build a new gym you plan for the gym equipment and activities and gym floor. But when it is time to choose the correct gym floor you will have doubts because there are a lot of products, product types, and thickness in the market.
Here you will have an idea of how to choose to correct floor for your home gym, commercial gym, or garage gym.
STEP1
What will be your gym activity? Functional training or maybe Crossfit or you can choose both activities.
If you are not going to have heavy exercises like Crossfit and weight lifting than you can choose a light floor that is mainly produced in roll forms. Rubber gym rolls generally available in the market from 3 mm to 12mm thickness.
Rubber rolls are ideal for functional training, TRX, and Cardio exercises and any type of general-purpose gym flooring. A higher thickness of rubber gym rolls is suitable for free weight training.
If you are going to have heavy exercises with heavyweights than the best flooring option will be rubber gym tiles.
Crossfit and weightlifting exercises and deadlift training needs a strong rubber flooring if you don’t choose the correct floor type and thickness than you may break your base floor (generally those nice ceramics and wood floors are more expensive than the rubber floors). And also these rubber floors will help you to protect your expensive gym equipment.
If you want a floor for both types of exercises than you may plan 2 different areas with 2 different floors or to make it easy you can choose the thicker product, this means if you have a floor suitable for Crossfit the same floor is also suitable for functional training.
STEP 2
The maximum weights in the gym. Now you have to indicate the maximum weights that you re going to have in the gym, if this will be for free weight training than generally the maximum weights of the dumbells will be 40 kgs.
If you are going to have Crossfit training than the average weights will be (bars included 120- 140 kgs)
Most of the gym flooring products are indicated with Maximum Weight Drop value or Critical Fall Height, you can choose the correct thickness by the maximum weight drop value. ( Maximum weight drop value is the safe floor thickness to drop down the weights )
Thick Gym Flooring or High-Density Gym Flooring
When you choose the thickness of the floor you need then you have to check the density of the floor. All the rubber floors are not the same. Higher thicknesses will have better protection but if the floors have the same density. When you have to compare 2 products in the same thickness try to choose the one with higher density. Lower density rubber flooring products like playground flooring tiles are softer and may break very easily if you drop down heavyweights.