Home Gym Flooring Ideas – Lifting weights and exercising on a firm and stable floor is fine, but that’s not an option for everyone. Some home gyms should be placed on carpeted floors. You can safely exercise on a carpet floor, even if the carpet is soft, lacks support and strength for lifting and for machines and can absorb bacteria. Therefore, it is better to put hard rubber mats or make a lifting platform on top of your carpet to get the most out of your home gym.
There is no doubt that you can perform some exercises directly on the carpet. Things like bodyweight exercises, yoga, stretching, and some cardio can be done regardless of the floor it’s on. The floor becomes more important with the increasing intensity of these types of exercise.
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Doing body weight circuits, or things like light squats and pushups are definitely safe to perform on carpets. In addition, primary focused exercise should be safe.
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If you’re working out on weight benches (such as dumbbell bench presses), you should be safe to just put the bench on your floor and work. You should check to make sure it doesn’t rock from side to side though!
Similarly, a spin bike like this one from Sunny Health has enough weight to keep it from sliding around when you’re out and about. However, you can end up with a lot of sweat on your carpet from riding hard, which is pretty gross (more on that later). Because of this, indoor cycling companies make mats specifically for indoor trainers, like this one from Wahoo Fitness.
Although you can exercise on carpet, there’s also a reason why you won’t see carpet floors in commercial gyms or CrossFit boxes. It’s not the most ideal floor to get up and exercise on.
The first and foremost reason you can’t see why people don’t exercise on carpet floors is because they are soft, spongy, and unstable. As a result, there is certainly a safety concern when it comes to building a home gym on carpet floors.
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Most of the cueing when it comes to weight lifting starts from the ground up. We are taught to screw our feet into the ground during squats and deadlifts and even push our feet into the ground during bench presses. However, when the floor is soft and spongy it is nearly impossible to develop the solid base needed to put yourself in a good lifting position.
Also, as you lift – especially when squatting or lunging, your foot will vibrate. This can affect your balance and/or how you apply force to the ground. This instability can lead to charges (like your knees or back) that can lead to injury in the long term.
Doing cardio workouts on treadmills or stationary bikes placed on carpet floors is fine, as outlined above. However, workouts on rowing machines can be problematic. High-caliber rowers lift and move around their machines as they put in the power – even if done on rubber floors. Even the most novice rowers can move their erg around a room if the machine is placed directly on carpeted floors. This movement leads to power leaks that reduce your speed. Your confidence will also drop as you feel yourself slipping.
Even cardio exercises like skipping can be suboptimal on the carpet. Although the carpet will provide a softer surface than skipping something like concrete, it will also serve as an energy leak. As such, you need to put more force on the ground with each jump which increases the fatigue in your lower body. In addition, the rope has more friction from hitting the carpet.
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Running and changing directions can also be dangerous when done on carpet. Any quick descent or change of direction will put you at risk of tripping and falling. It also poses a risk of ligament injuries and ankle and knee sprains.
I’ll start this with the caveat that I know nothing about home building and/or carpentry. However, I know that carpet floors have a subfloor underneath them. These subfloors are usually made of plywood or similar material. As you can imagine, the lifting, and more importantly the dropping, heavy weights of a carpet directly on top of the subflooring can present some problems.
This shouldn’t be a problem if you’re doing bodyweight exercises. However, you can damage your subfloor if you lift heavy weights, especially deadlifting or Olympic lifting. Even dropping a pair of dumbbells after a bench press or overhead press can be enough to crack or crack your subfloor, resulting in an expensive repair bill.
That being said, you need to consider the damage you can do UNDER your carpet when considering building your home gym on carpet floors.
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When we workout, we sweat. And when we sweat it drips on us. Lifting weights and exercising on carpeted floors means that our sweat gets on the carpet and that can get really bad over time. Accumulated sweat can lead to a (more) slippery surface and can result in bacterial growth.
Obviously it is possible to use a carpet cleaner in your home gym area regularly. However, this is more of a hassle than simply using a Swiffer wet mop type cleaner so it doesn’t have to be cleaned as often as a rubber floor.
I definitely know that I don’t use a carpet cleaner as often as a quick clean with my Vileda Spray Mop.
Also, chalk can be a carpet nightmare. I’ve written before about the importance of using chalk when lifting weights, so you should have chalk if you’re doing any serious lifting. Dropping a brick bucket is a sin in any gym because it is difficult to clean. However, on the carpet you add to the fact that the chalk will stick to the fabric and stick to any moisture.
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Even a careful chalk-up before a lift leads to particles flying through the air, which can lead to headaches.
Although exercising on carpet floors is not very good it does not mean that you cannot build a home gym in a room with carpet floors. You may need to get creative to build your training space.
The easiestway to overcome a carpeted home gym is to simply put rubber gym flooring over the carpet. I’ve written a lot about home gym flooring in the past. Rubber flooring is safe, easy to clean and specifically built to help protect you and your equipment from damage and injury.
Additionally, having carpet under a rubber floor adds to the noise dampening of dropping weights which may mean you don’t need dropper pads.
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In my case, we installed two layers of 3/8″ rubber flooring from Tydax. Importantly, we made the layers overlap so that the seams of the floor tiles were offset. This made it so that there are no “dead spots” where the two layers of the floor meet at the same seam.
If you are concerned about the noise associated with a home gym, check out my article on some important tips to sound proof your home gym.
Not all gyms require hard core rubber flooring. You can safely place the mat on your carpet if you regularly do machine exercises or body weight activities. Fortunately, mats can range in size from yoga mats to mats that can take up most of a room.
These are great options because they protect you (and your equipment) from sliding while you exercise. The mats also protect the carpet from collecting sweat.
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Most cardio equipment and weight machines come with rubber feet designed to keep the equipment in one place. These feet can slide around when placed directly on carpet but can “grip” rubber floors and mats to stay in place.
Simply put, they are a (fairly) affordable option to put you in a position to get the most out of your workouts while remaining safe if you build your home gym on carpet (or any other material, actually).
Building a platform for you home gym is the next step from simply laying rubber flooring over your carpet floor. A lift
ing platform is a specially constructed, (usually) raised area made of wood and rubber as a designated area for lifting weights. Platforms are especially useful for lifts like the deadlift, squat and Olympic lift variations.
Usually there is a metal outer frame that holds the wood and rubber components so that it does not move. The middle section, where you are standing, has several layers of plywood and probably a top layer of more expensive hardwood. The outer sections are topped with rubber flooring, or horse stall mats, to protect your weights and the floor from damage.
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A great step-by-step guide on how to build your own lifting platform can be found at Art of Manliness or you can check out the options from Rogue.
I hope this article gave you some
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