The rubber rolls are pretty nice and will give you a good surface if installed correctly over your concrete. Depending on what the concrete looks like when you pull up the carpet I would pour a layer of floor leveler or something similar as the rubber will contour to the exact substrate. You don't want bumps or anything. The tricky thing with the rolls is welding the seams. You need a special rubber floor seam welder. You can get a cheap one for a couple hundred bucks and probably do a decent job, or you can have a pro do it with their thousand dollar tooling. Depends on your DIY confidence level. If the seams fail later it will look very unprofessional. If you do it correctly its something that is manageable and would save you a lot of money over a pro install. Assuming you hired someone who knew what they were doing. If its just the local HD boys, chances are they might be winging it. Most of the good people are commercial installers, as that is where most of the rubber floor installs are.

Personally, for my pain cave, basement with concrete floor and in-floor heat. I leveled the floor and installed a manufactured wood floor, and then put down the foam interlocking squares where my bike, treadmill, and other strength equipment are located. It's also a bedroom and less than half of the room is pain cave, so that was the reasoning to make it a bedroom first instead of the whole thing as gym only type flooring.

Also, since its concrete, make sure to put down a moisture barrier, otherwise you will end up with moldy rubber down the road.

I have a regular laminate floor in the basement, for pain-cave use I just sit an old bathmat under the trainer to catch the sweat and any possible grime off the chain. (waxed chain, so it's minimal gunk, but a little does flake off when it's freshly waxed.)

every couple of weeks the bathmat goes in the wash and replaced with another. keeps things looking fresh and I have the option to just pack everything away and use the space as a normal room (my xbox is down there too, along with my home-office that normally doesn't get much use, except the last 3 weeks that's the only place I've worked)

---

Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

When I finished my basement I had the same question.

Go with luxury vinyl plank. Easy to install, easy to clean and tough to scratch/dent. If you sell the house, people will just see it as an empty room.

Concrete floor. Over the top of that we installed laminate wood flooring. One side of the basement is the pain cave the other is a tv room for the kids so put the same flooring throughout. On the cave side I put three pieces of this (link below). The rolls come 4' wide and you can get whatever length you want. Half the cave has this over the laminate. Covers the bike, treadmill, and a stretching space in between the two.

I've got the trainer close to one wall so it lines up in the middle of the 4' section. I have enough clearance on both sides so sweat doesn't make it to the joint of the next rubber piece. I butted the 3 pieces together. There is no need to weld the joints unless a joint is right below the bike but you should be able to set up the pieces so this doesn't happen. After each ride I wipe the puddles of sweat up. Usually after the long Saturday ride I'll wipe up the sweat, and spray the area with some Simple Green and do a quick scrub with a brush and water. Once a year I take them outside and scrub both sides and let them dry out. Find they tend to smell like dried sweat if you don't clean them periodically.

I wouldn't recommend the interlocking squares. They are too small and sweat will get in between the interlocking sections and ruin whatever flooring you put below. Unless you keep it concrete. The bigger sections of flooring are better.

https://www.rubberflooringinc.com/...hZPIDORoC_vMQAvD_BwE

I have the rubber rolls in mine. With a little patience during installation, the seams are barely noticeable.

https://www.tractorsupply.com/...ick-rubber-stall-mat

I put those in my own and two others i have built. amazing product and much better than the rolls.

+1 for the composite hard wood. IMO easier to clean than the rubber floor mats and you'll probably want a yoga mat or something under the trainer anyways. I did rubber mats in my basement when I refinished the area, now that I'm looking to do the other half of the basement I may take those mats out and do Pergo or something similar.

I have thick rubber interlocking tiles in my workout room, which is on my second floor. I ripped out the carpet and installed it over the plywood floor. Cleaning is not an issue because the tiles fit very tightly together. Yes, you can see where they interlock if you look for it, but the tiles are black so they blend together pretty well. Plus, I used 2x2 tiles, so each one is pretty large.

Tiles made it easy to install because you’re working with a bunch of smaller pieces, rather than a huge roll. Plus, if you make a mistake trying to cut to a corner or edge, just put that piece to the side and try on a new piece. You haven’t ruined an entire roll.

I'll be going with the interlocking exercise mats once I get a dedicated Pain Cave room. Super easy to install and look quite nice

https://amzn.to/3b1rO0d

I had these before we did our basement over. They work well but if you sweat as much as I do, the sweat will find it's way between the sections and soak whatever flooring you have underneath. If you put a yoga mat on top of these, or something seamless under the bike where you sweat you'll be fine with these.

I have installed thousands of sqft of rolled rubber and tile style. If its purely a gym, you want to do rubber, its easy to clean and very durable. Aim for something 8mm or thicker, any thinner and you will want to make sure you glue it down, but glue down is a mess and very permanent. I use a product called grip-strip, made by Capitol, its a double sided tape, its a very good product and if done well, you will have no issues. If you don't want to do rolled product, the tiles are nice, you can easily take them with you too if you leave.

The wood style you are looking at is going to be a little more slippery than a standard recycled rubber product. I do recommend you always get some color fleck (10-20%) to hide dirt, pure black shows everything.

Its not super hard to install, depending on your abilities. Feel to reach out, I am happy to answer question.

Have had a dedicated ‘pain cave’ and trainer for 30 years

Including weight bench, squat rack, deadlift etc

Upstate NY winters used a turbo trainer and rollers in the 80’s

Always just put a towel down on the floor under the trainer whether concrete, carpet, hard wood floor, tile, linolium or laminate

For the weights just used a coupe of 2’x2’ rubber gym squares

Doing my best Grouchy old man impression that asking why people make everything so complicated 😂

https://cyclingtips.com/...g-specific-flooring/ [/pink]

---

"I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10, and I don't know why!"

Wood or laminate wood in the room for future other uses or resale value. Then, go to harbor freight and get this roll for less than $10.00 to put your bike and trainer on and be done with it.
https://www.harborfreight.com/...g_q=anti-fatigue+mat

We kept the concrete floor and painted it with RustOleum Epoxyshield. Mat under the treadmill and the bike. I wipe down the bike mat from time to time. Easy to maintain, 10 years later still looks like new.

Lots of good options listed in this thread, good luck and congrats on the new place.

Question: Are the tractor supply mats heavy enough to stay flush side-by-side with one another even with a slight beveling down of a bare cement floor (towards a basement floor drain)?

I have just cement. And the Wahoo mat under the Kickr

Those things are heavy! You should be fine. I have the same thing in my garage with a not very well laid floor sloping down towards the drain. I have three mats in there that all line up.

I bought some from a different farm supply store and they aren't cut nearly as accurate/straight as something designed for flush side-by-side flooring.

I put the cheap foam rubber flooring all over my triathlon garage pain cave. They work GREAT - zero complaints!

For sure, the cheaper foam rubber isn't designed for heavy foot traffic (like a busy hallway), or dropping heavy weights or dragging heavy items across it regularly. But for triathlon, where you're mostly on a treadmill, stationary bike, Vasa, or lighter strength activities, it's absolutely no problem.

I sweat a ton as well, and contrary to what folks have experienced, I've had absolutely zero problems with sweat cleanup. Even if the sweat gets to the edge joins of the tiles, it's tight enough that nothing gets in there. It's definitely wayyyyy easier to clean than the cement, which stains from the water and sweat infiltration - with the foam mats, a quick towel swipe gets everything - it's awesome. And even if you're paranoid about the sweat reaching the floor base, it's trivially easy to pop out a mat to check or clean under it - literally seconds (but they don't pop loose working out, amazingly.)

If you're on the fence about what to get, I would highly recommend getting a small $25 pack of the foam mats and giving it a try - put 'me around your gear and see how it works out. That's the nice thing about the foam packs - so lightweight, so compact, and so inexpensive that even if you hate it and remove it (doubt it) or decide to go all-in with higher quality mats, you lose basically nothing.

I guarantee that compared to concrete (even super clean, nice concrete), the foam puzzle mats are a HUGE upgrade. My wife isn't an athlete and even she absolutely loves it - so soft, so clean, doesn't get cold to your feet (an amazingly big deal if you are in basement or garage), and looks "pro" despite the cheap cost. I can't even come up with a single negative about them - once of the highest bang for buck and exceeding expectations purchases I've ever done. Took my cold, harsh, oil-stained (from previous home owners cars) dungeon garage floor and turns it into a real gym environment nice enough that my wife likes to do her yoga and dance activities in there with no added mats. (Try getting her to do that on the cold stained concrete - no friggin way!)

I did my whole garage for <$150, covering nearly the entire surface. And it was trivially easy to do it, fun actually.

Not wanting to drop weights directly onto my concrete foundation, probably. Horse stall mats are inexpensive and super thick, they're perfect for the cause.


The ones from TCS fit super flush.



Yes. Though I did use this method to secure the outer most mats, you probably could live without doing so.

I used this in my workout room. I love it. Doesn't look like they have black right now.

https://www.amazon.com/...oding=UTF8&psc=1

---

_________________________________
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

You mentioned condo. If you have anyone below you concert floor is bad, as is any hard surface like like wood or laminate. The rubber tile sounds good as it absorbed most sound transmissions. If you are on ground floor. disregard this note.