Gym flooring is a broad category, covering as many types of mats as there are types of exercise. Choosing the right exercise mat for your gym involves deciding what kind of function you need from the flooring, which depends on the primary type of exercise for which the floor will be used. The first application would be free weight and heavy exercise equipment gyms. This is the most common function where rubber products would be used for gym or sport flooring. In this setting, the primary purpose of the gym matting is floor protection; damage due to dropping heavy weights on the floor is the prime motivator for purchasing gym mats. Moreover, the rubber flooring protect the equipment from concrete or cement floor. Gym floors of this type are generally covered with either rolled rubber products (for example, Rubber-Cal's Elephant Bark rubber flooring) or rubber tiles (such as Rubber-Cal's Eco-Sport Tiles). In home gym settings, which usually do not get a whole lot of foot traffic, rolled rubber products have the advantage of installation simplicity. The larger pieces are basically rolled out into the specified area, and generally stay in place primarily due to their own weight, as well as the weight of the equipment which is placed over the rubber flooring. With the addition of heavy exercise equipment, only the edges and seams require any sort of adhesion (to minimize tripping hazards), and this can often be accomplished with a few strips of double sided carpet tape, which can readily be purchased at your local hardware store. Besides easy installation, these types of gym flooring offer excellent wear life and durability. However, since rolled products are intended primarily as an economical gym matting option, they are usually not available in a wide range of colors. Most rolled matting is primarily black, often with the addition of color speckles to break up the otherwise uniform surface. Rolled products can also be permanently adhered to any hard subsurface using a polyurethane binding agent. Commercial gyms, or facilities which require rubber gym flooring, should consider a permanent installation, due to the high volume of foot traffic which traverse the product (i.e. liability issues.)The alternative to rolled products in covering a gym floor, would be rubber tiles. Generally, each tile is several square feet (Rubber-Cal's tiles are 2ft x 2ft, or four square feet), which means that more individual pieces are required to cover a given area when compared with rolled products. One benefit of this type of gym matting is increased thickness, since the thickness of rolled products is limited by both weight and the difficulty of rolling up rubber flooring thicker than about 1/2". Tiles are individual squares; therefore tiles can be produced as thick as 3.75". The fact that the product is installed as a tile makes replacing them an easy and inexpensive concern. Do not forget gym or fitness flooring, is put in place to absorb the abuse of the locations patrons. Another selling point for tiled gym matting is the variety of available colors. Because these mats are produced in tile form, it is fairly simple during production to make the majority of the tile from recycled rubber and tumble the rubber particulates with binding polyurethane paint. However, these products tend to be more expensive than rolled products, mainly because of the increased material thickness, thus material cost, and differences in production processes. Also, because the individual rubber tiles are fairly light compared to larger rolled pieces, these tiles usually must be adhered permanently to the gym floor. In order to choose the right exercise matting for your gym floor, these concerns must be weighed for the individual application. A second application, under the heading of gym mat or fitness matting, would be aerobic or cardio type exercise, such as step, aerobics, jazzercise, dance, etc. Exercise matting for these purposes prioritizes resilience over floor protection, since the weight of a single person is the most the flooring usually needs to support. Since resilient hardwood flooring tends to be out of the price range of most home gyms, alternatives such as resilient PVC tiles are becoming more popular for residential gym matting. Tiles of this sort (such as Rubber-Cal's Bounceee tiles) are lightweight, interlocking, and usually available in a variety of fun colors. Because of their low product weight and dovetail interlocking mechanism, these exercise mats are portable, and can be rearranged at will to suit individual needs. Functionally, this kind of tile rests on an arched support system; very little of each tile's thickness is material. The remainder of the thickness is a layer of air trapped beneath the area of the tiles. When pressure is applied to these mats, the tiles themselves flex, compressing the under-layer of air. Thereafter, the air expands to its original volume, creating a bounce-back resilient support. This type of gym mat is ideal for aerobic type applications; however it is usually not suitable for more general purpose gyms, especially in the presence of heavy gym equipment. Since the individual tiles are very lightweight, placing significant weight on this sort of tile tends to damage to support arches, rendering the product basically useless from a resilience standpoint. This kind of gym mat is most often used in specific areas rather than for covering an entire floor. The third application would be sports court and track flooring which are not a subset of the gym mats and rubber matting header, such as tracks or basketball courts. Most often, these areas are covered with pour-in-place flooring, rather than individual gyms mats. Most companies deal in either one or the other type of gym flooring, since pour-in-place flooring almost has to be installed by dedicated professionals, while most matting products can be installed either by consumers themselves or by flooring contractors without any specific training in rubber gym flooring. Pour-in-place flooring is installed by building a border around the specified area to the desired thickness of the floor, then pouring a urethane/ rubber compound into the defined area. Once this flooring has set, it acts as a complete sheet. This is especially useful for areas such as tracks, where the shape of the area makes using standard sized gym matting difficult. However, this type of flooring tends to be quite expensive, both for materials and installation. Most home gyms are not prepared for either the cost or commitment involved in flooring of this type. When building a home gym, it is important to know what that home gym means to you. Depending on the type of exercise involved, there are specific kinds of gym matting designed to meet your needs and specifications. Look at all options, ask for samples, breeze over installation guides, then compare prices and select a product. 
