How I Ended Up Buying the IncStores Rubber Flooring

The chip in the garage floor was about the size of a quarter. I found it in October 2023, the morning after a deadlift session where I set the bar down harder than I meant to. Bare concrete in a house built in the eighties does not forgive that. What bothered me more than the chip was the noise. Dana was in the kitchen directly above the left bay and she came to the top of the stairs to ask what had fallen. Nothing had fallen. I had set a barbell down.

I spent two weeks reading about flooring before I bought anything. Tiles, interlocking squares, horse stall mats, rolls. I measured the left bay three times because I did not trust the first two answers: 11 feet wide, 20 feet deep, 8 foot ceiling, one window. I lift in the front half, so the area that actually needed covering was closer to 8 by 10. That killed the idea of doing the whole floor and made a couple of rolls the sensible buy. I ordered two rolls of the IncStores Tough Rubber Roll, 3/8 inch thick, 4 by 10 feet each, and laid them side by side.

Forty square feet per roll, so two gave me the 8 by 10 with nothing to cut. They arrived on a pallet. I slid them out of the truck and walked them into the bay rather than lifting, which my back appreciated. The first went down flat right away. The second kept some memory from being rolled and needed a day with weight on it before it relaxed. I laid plates across it overnight and by the next morning it sat where I put it.

The smell is worth telling you about, because it is the thing I would have wanted to know. New rubber smells like new rubber. For the first two or three weeks the garage had an odor you noticed when the door came up. I left the garage door open during the day and ran the box fan, and it faded out on its own. By the end of the month I could not find it anymore.

Two years of dropped plates later, the concrete under the mats is the only part of that floor without a chip in it.

The deadlift test came in the first week. Same weight, same drop, and the sound changed from a crack to a thud. Not silent. Rubber does not make a barbell quiet. But the sharp part of it was gone, and Dana stopped coming out to the stairs. The chip stayed the size of a quarter.

The rest of the setup moved onto it. The rack went up a week later and sits on the mats without being bolted down. The bench came in the spring. Plates get set down on it every morning at 5:30 and nothing has walked or curled at the edges. Cleaning takes a damp cloth, maybe once a month, a couple of minutes total. IncStores warrants the roll for five years, which is longer than I expect to need.

One thing I did not expect: the mats changed how the space feels to work in. The bay is unheated, and the rubber is warmer underfoot on a January morning than concrete ever was. My left knee is cranky from years of crawling through attics, and standing on the mat instead of the slab for an hour is easier on it. Not a fix for anything. Just less unpleasant.

The rower stays on the bare concrete next to the mats. It has a flat footprint and does not bang, so it does not need padding, and leaving it off keeps the 8 by 10 clear for the rack and the bench. That is the whole layout in an 11 by 20 bay. It works because the mats are a defined rectangle instead of wall to wall, so the truck bay and the walkway to the house door stayed concrete.

Cole trains with me two mornings a week now that baseball season is done. Teenagers drop things. The mats have taken that without a mark, and the plates have not chipped anything since October 2023. I would not call the surface soft. It is dense and it does not give much underfoot, which is what I wanted under a squat stance. The 3/8 inch thickness absorbs a set down plate without turning the floor into a sponge.

The only real complaint I have is the settling period on the second roll. Two days of a corner wanting to lift is not a crisis, but it is worth knowing if you plan to lay one down on a Friday and lift on a Saturday. Weight on it overnight solves it. The other thing to know is that these are rolls, not squares. That is the reason they look clean in my bay, and also the reason you want to measure twice before you order.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to measure the space and buy for the area you actually lift in, not the whole floor. I would tell you that 3/8 inch has been enough for a home setup with a rack, a bench and a barbell that gets set down, and that thicker rolls exist if you are dropping from overhead or parking something heavy on top of it. I would tell you the smell is real for a few weeks and then it is gone, so do not panic on day three. If you are comparing these against horse stall mats, spend ten minutes on it, because the answer comes down to how much give you want and how much give you can live with. I bought the IncStores rolls because two of them fit my bay with nothing to trim, and two years on, that is still the reason I would buy them again.