Read This First! The Perfect Home Gym Flooring
Sometimes I stumble across something brilliant…not very often, but when I do - I am so excited to share it with you! If you are looking for a flooring solution for your gym, I think I may have found The Perfect Home Gym Flooring!
Gym flooring can be so HARD! It is either flooring meant for a gym and not good for anything else, or flooring meant for a home and not for a gym! We have two rooms that we use for our gym, one for cardio equipment and one for weights and everything else, which means a lot of square footage to fill with rubber matting in a house! The smell would have been terrible, and let’s face it, if we ever decide to sell, how many people would want a basement full of rubber flooring. It just doesn’t work well for family room environments. On the other hand, if we decided to use vinyl flooring, which is perfect for basements and great for resale, it can mark so easily with the heavy equipment and overall gym use. That’s when we stumbled across Home Depot’s Lifeproof Scratched Stone Luxury Vinyl Flooring! The key is the Scratched Stone finish! It is quite literally perfect!
Great for home gym OR family rooms!
My husband and I will probably have a basement full of gym equipment until we are 80…but if we would ever decide to sell our home, the next owner may not be the gym enthusiasts that we are. The scratched stone finish works great for a gym, but if anyone ever decided to turn the space into a family room area, it easily can make that transition. My entire family liked this flooring finish better than any of the other options regardless of whether we used it as a gym or not. It’s a fun flooring that could work great for a playroom or entertaining area, just as easily as a gym.
Doesn’t show marks because it is heavily distressed
This is the best part about this flooring! We had decided to go the vinyl flooring route, but every sample we looked at gave me nightmares thinking about all the marks and scratches on the floor from moving benches and equipment around. We are pretty hard on our floor and I didn’t want to have to be stressing every time I put down a set of weights. This flooring is PERFECT! There is so much distressing, you never have to worry about leaving marks even if you are dragging benches etc. The reality is that you would probably never even notice wear and tear, since the pattern on the floor already has scratches and marks in the distressing.
You have to see it for yourself - but it is a perfect finish for vinyl gym flooring!
Very little VOC’s
Here is where this floor has an advantage over rubber flooring. The smell emitted from rubber flooring can be terrible for months, especially for those sensitive to odors. I think the problem is even worse when installed in a basement with less airflow, and a large amount of square footage - it could have made the gym unbearable for months. We have an Airthings air quality monitor in our basement which measures a variety of things, VOC’s being one of them. The VOC’s were pretty negligible with the new flooring. I was amazed at how low they stayed, significantly less than rubber flooring!
Can withstand holding heavy equipment
I can not say what the actual rating is for this floor, I can only speak to my experience - and over the last 6 months that we have had it installed, I can see no damage from the heavy weights and usage. We have three areas I was most concerned about: the weight rack (which holds over 700lbs), the Power Cage with the pulley system which also holds a lot of weight, and the deadlifting area.
Both of the areas that hold the heaviest amount of weights, the rack, and the cage have not shown any damage to the flooring under the mats, at least from what I can see. I was also concerned about the deadlifting area when my husband lifts because not only does he use very heavy weights (sometimes over 450 lbs), there is a certain amount of impact involved when the bar is put back down. We have the deadlift area on stall mats to help absorb some of that impact, but I can hear my husband’s weights hitting the ground when I am upstairs…YIKES! Surprisingly, it has not left any damage to the flooring so far.
I have no idea whether 5 or 10 years from now there will be any wear and tear from the areas that hold the heaviest weights, but we are 6 months in and everything still looks great.
The finish is somewhat non-slip
Meg and I have previously trained at two locations that had an issue with this, which made me very aware that I needed to find a flooring that was not slick. I would probably not have been so insistent on having a non-slip flooring had we not experienced it first hand, but doing mt climbers or suicides on a slick floor can be treacherous! We had trained on both a vinyl floor and a mat flooring (the puzzle-type flooring), which one would have thought would be great for a gym, but both were extremely slick.
I tried lateral movements on all of the floors, and while the Scratched Stone flooring isn’t exactly non-slip, it was by far the best of any that I tried! I have no trouble with sliding or feeling like I have to be tentative with my movements with this flooring.
The color is very cool gray
I just want to mention that between my lighting and the pictures, it makes the flooring look like it has more brown and warmth to it…it does not. It is a very cool gray finish, with no yellow really at all.
