The price of mats is way too high for me so I've been looking at ways to build mat space for my gym cheaper. I have managed to pick up a few used ones from a private school near me but it isn't nearly enough. I might try approaching other schools as well but I'm really interested in making my own now.
My thought was to just go to a fabric store and purchase a whole bunch of thick foam and vinyl fabric and just glueing the vinyl to the foam really well. Do you guys think that will work? It is for home use only and not for a school or anything.
Depending on how this idea works I may only use the foam and vinyl to pad the walls and then use Wal Mart puzzle mats for the floor.
We do two layers of puzzle mat on an area of our floor and it works very well and is quite inexpensive compared to a typical gym mat. You can find 100 sq. feet for around $75 or so on E-BAY under gym mats.
On a side note I also thought I could build a good kicking shield in the same manner, just glue vinyl to thick pieces of foam, just have to figure out how I will add the handles.
I noticed that Wal Mart is selling two kinds of puzzle mat now, the multi coloured ones as well as the all black ones in the fitness section for weight room floors. You find the puzzle mats hold together well?
I have puzzle mats I got like 50 square feet on ebay for a little over 100 bucks including shipping. The puzzles are all you need for sparring, grapling etc.
They hold together pretty good make sure they are 1/2 inch thick. We do takedowns and all that shit on them and they work great. Awesome alternative to spendind a thousand dollars on gym mats.
Yeah I'm liking the puzzle mat idea combined with the foam and vinyl wall padding, also would be perfect to pad support beams since it will be in a basemant gym.
Yeah we use some of that 1" thick foam padding on the base of our wall. But we just went and bought enough puzzle mat to cover the rest of our wall to work our takedowns. We just used some adhesive for the wall. So puzzle mats are all over the place at our club.
I don't remember the sellers but if you search under gym mats and scroll through you'll see the multi colored puzzle mat pictures. I think buying 100 sq feet is the best deal. Somewhere around $75-$95 total shipping included. I need to get some for my garage.