- [Narrator] Morning motivators,
the pain cave is coming together.
We just put down the rubber floor and I'm gonna share with
you after now going through two, no three,
four versions of gym garage flooring.
What I feel is the best way to lay down garage flooring,
what garage flooring you should select and what you should
really, really avoid to save on a lot of money
and a lot of headaches.
Before we get into what you should buy,
what you should not buy and the easiest things to buy in
order to be able to work with it effectively and have a
little bit of flexibility in what you're doing,
why you should really put down a rubber gym flooring,
is a few reasons.
Number one is obviously it's really nice on the body.
If you've got a really hard concrete floor and a basement or
a garage where most gyms end up getting set up,
it's a lot nicer to have that cushion just to move around.
It's a lot more comfortable.
And if you're ever going to do any sort of jumping movement,
it's very, very necessary.
If you're going to put down any equipment,
like a Zwift set up,
like I'm going to have there, a treadmill here,
you need something that's going to absorb all of that shock
and that chatter or the entire house is going to rattle.
And all of your loved ones are not going to be
very happy with you. In addition to that,
this is a really big thing for me.
It might be a little bit echoey in here for you,
but once we actually lay down this flooring,
the echo level comes way, way down,
rubber flooring, in my opinion,
phenomenal for taking the echo level down in a certain area.
Now you might think, why do I really care about that
if I'm not making videos?
Well, just from a stress standpoint,
we're going to put so much stress on our body, in the gym,
with the Zwifting, with the treadmill running,
with the weight training,
with whatever you're doing in here,
that we do enough that's stressful to our body,
that we don't need to add on a lot of additional frequencies
around. And depending on who you are,
if you're somebody like me, who's fairly sensitive to noise,
bringing that echo level down is actually really good for
calming your system. So from a practicality standpoint,
very important. And then just from a, you know,
being healthy kind of standpoint, also important,
let's go back down to the floor.
Let's start off with what you don't need.
Certainly what you don't need,
unless you are a gym that specializes in Olympic lifting is
an Olympic lifting mat.
Like one of these really big thick mats.
I actually started out with a makeshift version of this
thinking this was absolutely necessary
for the weightlifting that I was doing,
because I'm a really big believer in concentric dead lifts
and dropping the weights at the top.
I know all of you hate that when I do it,
but there's a lot of science behind it.
The reason that you don't need this is that it's just,
it's overkill. So you're going to pay a lot.
You can get away with a lot less for your average home gym.
Next most common thing.
Well, some people might think about wood planks
or old wood sheets. Again, this was the next step up.
And I got something that was foam underneath the wood,
thinking that this would be really nice and that it would
have a lot of give what happened was of course the wood just
chipped and it wasn't even like I was dropping weights all
over it, just moving around it with weights
and putting things that have a lot of chatter,
like treadmills, like Zwift setups on this.
Not very good. It really doesn't dull the vibrations at all.
The next thing. Now, getting closer to probably what
you've been looking at are these four by eight,
these thick three quarter mat.
Again, this was the next step up that I ended up moving to.
And I had a certain area that had these really big thick
mats. Again, I thought that this is what I needed,
that I needed this amount of thickness,
but what ends up happening is you're buying something that
is so, so expensive. These are,
I believe upwards of one to $200
if I remember right, per mat.
And again, it's way overkill.
The third thing is that they end up being so heavy that it's
a real pain to move them around.
So what I ended up doing with the last gym build that I did
was actually this, this is where I went, okay.
I want something that's going to be easier to move around.
So I went with these roles and this is getting closer and
closer to what I have actually decided on here after four
kicks at it.
Now these roles are a really, really good option.
Why I like these roles is, as you can see here,
they are a lot thinner.
You can get these in all different thicknesses,
but typically they come anywhere from an eighth of an inch
to about a half an inch.
And they come in and roll sizes of about 4 feet wide
by 25 feet long.
Again, really, really great in theory to have this.
But when you have a hundred square feet,
it ends up being really hard to work with.
I didn't think it being just a quarter inch thick,
but that 25 running feet of roll ended up being over a
hundred pounds. Moving those things around was really,
really difficult also because it's 25 feet,
any small little space means that you're doing a ton of
cutting and these things,
when they get to be a quarter inch thick,
it is really not pleasant to cut these.
Here's what I've gone with.
This isn't where I actually bought this.
This is where I bought the last gym build from.
I ended up finding these locally on Facebook marketplace,
but I would go with a product like this,
like a Gator Pro role.
And if you can find them in four by six sizes,
not this four by twenty-five size,
but some sort of role like that. That is absolutely ideal.
That's what I got here because they're so easy to move
around. Each of them maybe only weighs about 10 pounds.
Then here's a couple of final keys to fine tune getting the
best setup. You have an eighth of an inch,
you've got a quarter of an inch.
You got five sixteens just thicker than a quarter,
three eights of an inch or a half an inch.
What I've actually gone with here is an eighth of an inch
where what I had before was a quarter of an inch.
And the reason that I went with an eighth of an inch is
because quarter of an inch, it was just, again,
really hard to work with really hard to cut.
The eighth of an inch,
it isn't providing as much cushioning,
but as they started using this eighth of an inch,
when I was testing it out from the people
that I bought it from, I was like, you know what?
I think this is probably going to be good for coming in here
at most five, six times a week for a little bit of time.
It's really only once you start getting into really high
traffic areas that I feel you need any of the thicker stuff.
Finally, the last thing, and this is really,
really important. Don't go with just flat black,
even though it's going to be the cheapest option.
There's a reason for that. The second I laid down,
the first roll in the old gym,
it was instantly dirty and it didn't matter how many times I
swept it every single day. It was always, always dirty.
So specifically in this gym,
I have selected something with a flack.
That was a non-negotiable.
I've been moving around in this for the past
couple hours, positioning everything.
And it still looks pretty clean once you end up selecting
the floor, the rest is really pretty easy.
First thing you gotta do is you gotta prep the surface and
the easiest way to do that,
depending on how prepared or unprepared your floor surface
is really just by smoothing it out. In my case,
all I needed to do was go around, scraping everything.
I just used a small little pry bar that had a flat end.
You could use something like paint scraper,
or even like a putty knife.
As long as you don't have really big things,
just need to make it a little bit smoother and then give it
a good sweep. Ideally with a fairly coarse brush.
That was all I needed to do.
If you have a fairly uneven surface,
you might need to put down something like a quick drying
self leveling cement,
just to smooth it all out so that because you have that
eighth of an inch that you've saved money on
and added the maneuverability,
you really need to make sure the underlying surface is
fairly smooth or everything's going to poke through.
And it's not going to be super comfortable, after you've got
the surface prepared and you've selected the nice,
easily workable, easily maneuverable,
small four by six sheets that are nice and thin.
It's really super easy just to lay everything down.
It's just a matter of positioning it into place.
So what you do is you want to start with a corner and then
start working your way all the way down one side.
When you get to the end, you have to cut it off.
If you've selected the eighth of an inch,
this is going to be really easy.
If you select the quarter of an inch,
it's going to be really, really hard.
I had nothing but jagged edges on the old pancakes,
but with the eighth of an inch,
all you need to do is you need to put a board underneath in
behind the rubber and then a straight edge could be another
board on top of it and run an Exacto knife along it.
About three times just gradually breaking it up.
If you're cool with sacrificing the end of an Exacto knife,
which really should be doing,
you can cut on concrete and it's not really going to damage
the concrete.
And it's actually going to make things a lot easier because
you only need the one board on top and you can just press
that down into the ground.
You do want to stagger the joints a little bit where
everything meets up.
So what you can do is as you run something all the way down
one end, and then cut off at the end,
use the cutoff from that end to start the other end again,
work your way down and then do the cutoff at the end.
Use that cutoff to start the other end.
And this is going to end up staggering, the joints nicely.
And it's going to reduce the amount of waste that you have.
So your cost is going to be lower.
Here's something that I didn't do,
but you could certainly consider doing.
And I did it on the last garage belt,
but just decided that I'd wait to see how things go.
If you come down here,
you're not going to be able to see it.
But the first thing that NTK noticed when she came in here
is waves and wrinkles. Well, that was fully expected.
As you start maneuvering things,
it's not going to lay down perfectly flat.
It will end up relaxing a little bit over the next couple of
weeks, and it'll start laying down a little flatter,
but there will always be wrinkles.
If those wrinkles bug you,
you can search online for some two way tape.
And you're looking for, you know, what I'll just share.
This is on that perfectsurfaces.com website that I was
telling you about the Gator tape double-sided flooring tape.
This is what we ended up using on the last garage build.
It was really good to keep everything down on the side.
Just keep everything tucked right down,
the reason that we didn't go with it here is
because if you ever need to take things up,
this thing's pretty gooey.
Like it's really kind of messy and sticky.
So I peeled a little bit up at the last garage build and
yeah, it was a little bit ugly underneath. Your choice.
So motivators that is another step of island relaxo.
The new headquarters being put together,
what we're going to put together over here is
the Zwift setup, killer treadmill set up.
And all of this is actually going to be fairly unique.
It's going to be very different than what we had at the old
pancake.
So if you want to stick around for that and you aren't yet
subscribed, hit the subscribe button below.
If you are subscribed it is a heck of a lot
of work to lay down floor all around cameras,
moving a camera around constantly.
We put a lot of work into doing this,
and if you enjoyed this video, found it helpful.
I would appreciate a like below, later motivators.