How Can Your Weight-Room Flooring Keep You Safe?

There are a number of well-established rules for the weight-room floor. Each one of these rules has been carefully selected through common sense or by painful firsthand experience to keep people safe and sound when using weight training facilities. Some of these rules are self-explanatory. Such a, always use a spotter, and always return your weights to their proper place after you’re done using them. There is however one common rule, often seen in commercial gyms, which urges weight trainers of any and every experience level not to drop the weights. This rule has caused a rift in the weight training community. Realistically there are only a few instances where you would consider dropping the weights, such as dumbbell bench presses, dumbbell overhead press, barbell and dumbbell dead lifts, clean lifts, and jerk lifts. However, we can easily picture many other instances when someone might risk dropping a weight rather than risking personal injury. A commercial gym’s motivation for not allowing this practice can be varied, but two of the main reasons have to do with a desire to protect flooring and equipment, which is of course reasonable. But these reservations can easily be answered through the use of proper weight-room flooring. Whether you decide to use an individual workout mat (which comes in a predetermined size) or if you want to cover all the surface of a room with the use of gym tiles, high endurance rubber flooring is the perfect fit for any weight room—commercial or private. Here are the three main ways that using rubber flooring will keep you safe while you pump iron!

2. Protect yourself from fly-away iron.

When dealing with weights there is double the risk of injury. Not only do you have to worry about the internal workings of your body—making sure you don’t strain any muscles, tear any ligaments, and so on, but you also have to protect your body externally. There’s the obvious stuff, such as making sure you don’t drop any dumbbells or barbells on your feet! But back to the issue of dropping weights, you have to also worry about the possibility of weights actually cracking and shattering like glass. With the most common gym flooring being concrete—iron, chrome, and even plastic weights are at risk of breaking if dropped. A fly away piece of material could hit you hard enough to cause some serious damage.

This is also true of concrete weights covered in rubber molding, with the risk being that a dumbbell might bounce back up after it’s dropped and land on your foot. This risk is significantly diminished with the use of a thick heavy-duty workout mat. Because rubber is elastic and flexible, it will offer a far more accommodating surface than naked concrete or hardwood floors.

3. Protect yourself by protecting your equipment.

Shoddy and damaged equipment pose a risk to any weight trainer or weight-room floor! When you’re lifting more than a hundred pounds over your head you want to make sure that your equipment can be trusted. A good way to ensure the longevity of your equipment, especially if it’s seeing some strenuous use, is to add rubber gym tiles to your weight room subsurface. Exceptional thick tiles are made with elastic rubber precisely for these applications. Made out of solid rubber, this specialized flooring offers shock-absorbing cushion that not only protects the subflooring of your weight room but also guards against damage to equipment. And having good safe equipment, from what’s under your feet to what you’re holding above your head (especially if it weighs more than a hundred pounds!), is a corner-stone of any safe weight-room practice.

This is also true of concrete weights covered in rubber molding, with the risk being that a dumbbell might bounce back up after it’s dropped and land on your foot. This risk is significantly diminished with the use of a thick heavy-duty workout mat. Because rubber is elastic and flexible, it will offer a far more accommodating surface than naked concrete or hardwood floors.