Garage gym and flooring

This is an overview of which flooring to use for your garage gym. If you are interested in more detail around a garage gym, check the related articles in this post.

Goals

Whether a home gym makes sense for you depends highly on your personal goals. Gym memberships can be very cheap, especially if you make no use of the classes or trainers. So check your goal set and some factors before deciding on big expenses for a home gym.

Distance to gym
Opening times
Self-motivation
Current discipline

The distance to your gym is one of the impactful factors whether a gym makes sense or not. The further away the gym door is from your own the more sense it makes to switch to a home gym. Once you commute an hour to your gym it will definitely be beneficial to start a home gym.

If you work shift it will also help to have a gym that is open 24/7. Most gyms are not open 24/7 with a few exceptions. Combine this with long commutes and you get the idea.

Motivation can be a tricky topic. As long as you can stay motivated and push the workout without external motivators you are a good candidate for a home gym. So ask yourself seriously whether you will keep up the routine once you are home with no official appointments.

The last thing to look at is how disciplined you are about your attendance. If you continuously hit three times a week already or more you can look into it. If you think you will be more disciplined by having a home gym that is usually not what happens.

Concrete

Concrete is probably the worst type of flooring you can have for your garage gym. This will bring up the injury risk and have higher wear and tear on the equipment. If you have a concrete floor in your garage you can easily get it ready with horse mats. Horse mats are cheap and sturdy and are ideal for lifting. If you want to do yoga meditate you might want to get foam instead.

Wood

Wood will be easier on your body and equipment but also deform quicker than concrete. Here a platform for deadlifting might be the right choice to avoid any permanent changes to the structure. Especially if you lift very heavy. Again, horse mats will do the trick for the rest of the gym, but I would put a platform in the area where you want to deadlift or drop weight from overhead.

Platform

A platform can transform most floors into a gym-ready area. PLatforms are usually made of multiple layers of plywood to dampen the impact of the weight dropped. A platform will usually put you back around 200 - 500. There also some good online guides on how to build a platform yourself.

Gym mats

If you intend to do martial arts and be on the floor a lot you might want to invest in Judo mats or something similar. Using horse mats might be a little rough in this case. You can half the available space in horse mats and martial arts area for your garage gym to cover all scenarios.

Horse mats

Horse mats are a low budget option that does the job and will ever let you down for heavy lifting.

Summary

Survey the area and check what you want to do in your gym. Based on what is available horse mats are usually a safe bet in combination with most floors to protect equipment and floor at the same time.