7 PRO Tips for Stall Mat Gym Flooring

so one of the best and most popular options for flooring in your home gym is a horse stall mat so popular that with the growth of home gyms they may actually be outselling their design purpose these mats are affordable they're thick they're heavy and they do a really good job of protecting your foundation as well as your gym equipment there are however a few things that you should keep in mind in order to maximize your horse stall matte floor in terms of aesthetic function and smell in this video i'll share seven pro tips and a bonus at the end that you can use to do just that more on this coming up [Music] hey what's up friends i'm glad you're here because today is yet another perfect day to talk about gym equipment hey guys my name is adam with garage gym lab and if you're new here this channel is all about testing and reviewing gym equipment building the home gym community and providing inspiration to anybody out there who's looking to build their dream gym so if that's something you're into i definitely encourage you to subscribe that way you can stay up to date with all the weekly content when it comes to owning a home gym or really any gym for that matter flooring is one of the most important factors that you have to consider even if you're not doing heavy deadlifts or dropping bars from overhead it's going to help distribute that force across your foundation which of course is going to help protect it it's going to provide a safer surface for your gym equipment and it's going to feel better physically through your joints etc flooring can range anywhere from cheap rubber tiles from amazon which i don't typically recommend up to horse stall mats and then even above that proper rolled rubber which is unquestionably the best type of rubber flooring but which also can cost thousands and thousands of dollars one of the reasons why horse stall mats are such a popular option is because they're relatively affordable at forty to fifty dollars per mat at that price let's say you've got a 500 square foot gym well you can lay down a full horse stall matte floor in the one thousand dollar range now horse stall mats come in a couple of main different sizes although what most people buy and what i typically recommend are the six foot by four foot mats with 3 4 inch thickness these are very durable they're extremely dense and they're also very heavy at about 100 pounds each so when i first started my garage gym i built your standard 8x8 platform with horse stall matte sides and honestly i wasn't a very big fan of it not only in terms of its general size but also in terms of the horse stall mats that i picked for it more on that in a second i later decided to upgrade my rack to something that didn't need to be bolted to anything so i ditched that platform and when i did that i elected to buy 20 horse stall mats and cover my entire floor from end to end when i got done with that i was honestly pretty blown away by the results it in my eyes was the best looking horse saw matte floor that i had ever seen and i received a lot of questions from people asking what the flooring even was because it almost looked seamless now when i moved to this house and restarted my garage gym i went a different flooring route as you can see but with my horse stall mat experience i've come up with these tips that i'm confident if you use you'll take your horse saw matte flooring game up a few notches as well so kicking off with number one my top recommendation is for you to do anything that you can to find a smooth top stall mat typically stall mats come in one of two profiles you've got your smooth top and then you've got your diamond pattern which is what you see here i actually just went out to tractor supply this morning to pick this up unfortunately all they had was diamond patterns but as i thought more about it it's actually a good thing because i can demonstrate it a little bit better here in this video so i mentioned before that i built that 8x8 platform but i really wasn't a big fan of it and one of the biggest reasons was that i picked those diamond pattern stall mats now to be fair i thought it was the only thing that was available so i'll give myself a little bit of grace there but it really proved to be a big mistake and i hated it for a few different reasons one reason is that it's almost impossible to create a cohesive looking floor because it's very difficult if not again impossible to line up those raised edges from matte to matte so you're going to get a very choppy looking floor the second thing was that it was very awkward on any movement from the floor like a deadlift it reminded me a lot of those dreaded hex plates that you find in the commercial gym where you're constantly having to adjust your bar path because every time you hit the ground it awkwardly slides in a different direction thirdly it just felt a little bit weird underneath your feet you've got a combination of raised and flat portions of the rubber and to that further it also may affect the level of some of your gym equipment now when it was time for me to upgrade my flooring and i decided to go smooth top stall mats i had to call around to basically every tractor supply in my region and i ended up having to drive two and a half hours into a different state in order to find them but the difference was huge it was much more functional and it was much more aesthetic tip number two is to try to buy all of your mats at the same time from the same company tractor supply company is the most common store that you can find these at although there are other feed and tax stores that you can look into as well as some fitness companies that may be proximate to you that sell them as well this is purely an aesthetic tip but you greatly increase the chances of your flooring looking more seamless and cohesive if you buy them all at the same store at the same time because odds are they were generated and produced in the same lot for example when i went full coverage i bought 17 of my 20 from one store and i had to drive to another store to get the remaining three and you could definitely tell a difference when i laid them all out thankfully i had a small deadlift platform that i had built to kind of hid the three outliers so you didn't really see the imperfections whereas the other 17 blended almost perfectly together tip number three if it's at all possible try to buy your mats during cold weather months typically these mats are sitting outside in a lot at tractor supply or elsewhere and they're very susceptible to conditions think of them sort of like living beings when it's cold outside like some of us men can relate to they tend to shrink up a little bit and when it's hot outside especially when you introduce some humidity into the equation they tend to swell and expand if only it were that easy it'd be like 80 degrees in my house so anyway if you've ever noticed in your flooring or maybe somebody else's flooring seams that magically appear and disappear during different times of the year then this is very likely the reason why why i suggest you buy your mats in cold weather months is that the mats themselves are already shrunk therefore whenever you lay them out and pack them in tight you essentially set the seams even when it gets hot outside and there's a lot of humidity it's not going to buckle on you because of the sheer weight of the mats themselves as well as the weight of the equipment that's on top i bought my mats in january and because of that my floor looked virtually seamless all year round even an extremely hot and humid conditions where the heat index would regularly hit 105 degrees like it is right now in my lovely state of south carolina tip number four trim your mats and change your blades often i recommend changing your blades out every two maybe three mats because it's gonna dull very quickly and a dull blade is enemy number one when it comes time to cutting through these bad boys don't use a jigsaw or anything like that a sharp utility knife is the best way to cut through a horse doll mat when it is time to cut don't try to saw through it this is harder it takes more energy and it's just going to take longer instead start at the top and score it until you break through when that happens return to the top score some more until you have enough cut that you can create some separation at this point a sharp blade is going to cut through that mat like butter and you'll have your mats trimmed and laid out in no time tip number five prevent movement or seams with tape or mending plates if you find you have some seams either because of temperature or because your mats aren't wall-to-wall tight then a very popular and effective way to combat that is by taping them from the top the best product to use for that is black gorilla tape i'll put a link in the description down below functionally it works perfectly aesthetically it blends in okay i don't really care for the look very much personally but it is a great option nonetheless if you're like me and you don't really care for the look then you can try what alan thrall introduced a couple years ago which is a great idea and it's actually putting mending plates underneath your mats when you install them these basically bridge the mats together they keep them very tight and they're thin enough to where you don't feel anything weird underneath you tip number six let your stall mats off gas or use an odor eliminator the biggest downside to a horse saw mat is that they can emit a very intense rubber smell some people find this to be totally overwhelming and while that smell does tend to dissipate some over time there's a couple steps that you can take to help speed that process up or otherwise improve it one way is to just take them outside let them sit out in the sun okay don't stack them just lay them out let them individually off gas and get some vitamin d depending on how many mats you bought and how much space you actually have outside to allocate to something like this it may be a bit challenging and results can vary depending on how long you actually let them sit outside it really is recommended that you do so for about two to three days although that's not really practical for a lot of people so the other option is to use an odor eliminator or a deodorizer like autobahn i'll put a link in the description down below but you just thoroughly apply those to your mats and according to some people it does a really good job of helping reduce some of that smell tip number seven clean your stall mats with simple green or a dedicated rubber cleaner i tried a bunch of different products when it came to cleaning my stall mats and i always came back to simple green because it was effective and it was affordable you can either buy the spray version or if you have a larger area you can buy the bigger bottle the fully concentrated bottle and then just cut it with some water for really stuck on their dirt and grime i'd recommend picking up one of these deck brushes you can get them for less than ten dollars and they last forever prior to doing any of that however i would definitely recommend you removing all the loose particles off of your stall mats either with a leaf blower or a shopvac and i would definitely recommend a leaf lower to any garage gym owner it's a very underrated tool to keeping your garage gym nice and clean here's a bonus tip if you're moving a bunch of stall mats get yourself some stall mat grippers i'll put a link in the description down below i did not do this when i bought 20 of them and my grip and my forearms were feeling it for days afterwards stall mats are heavy and they're very awkward to move around these make your life a lot easier especially if you're moving them by yourself well there you have it friends seven pro tips with a little bonus thrown in there at the end if you follow these tips i think you'll be very happy with your stall matte flooring if you have tips of your own or maybe you've learned some things along the way definitely comment down below would love to get the conversation going we'd love to see what other people are doing out there to maximize their horse stall mat flooring as always guys thank you so much for tuning in i really appreciate it i look forward to seeing you on the next video until then be well and we'll chat soon [Music] bye

Channel: Garage Gym Lab

Views: 18,590

Rating: 4.9438376 out of 5

Keywords: garage gym, home gym, home gym tour, garage gym tour, garage gym lab, rep fitness, sorinex, rogue fitness, rogue, titan fitness, plae, prime fitness, gym equipment, gym reviews, fringe sport, dumbbells, barbells, squat rack, power rack, gym gear, benches, specialty bar, barbell, dumbbell, Titan, Bench Press, Squat Rack, rack pulley, lat pulldown, low row, rack attachments, power racks, Gym Floor, Horse Stall Mats, Tractor Supply, Gym Flooring, Stall Mats

Id: ana4D8fNyK0

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021