Coffee has long been the fuel of athletic performance. Whether it’s gutting it through the last mile or squeezing out the last rep, coffee is the performance enhancing drug that helps folks push past their limits. And now, coffee is also the thing that’ll keep the weights from clanging around when you’re throwing them on the ground, as one company has created the “world’s first coffee-infused gym flooring.”
Announced via press release, the new coffee mats are the product of the UK’s Sprung Gym Flooring. The aptly-named Ground Floor Collection are comprised of 30% used coffee grounds along with the brand’s proprietary high-density rubber. The result is a 20mm thick, shock-absorbing surface that will keep the power lifters from wrecking your floors while also offering a “subtle roasted coffee aroma, designed to serve as both a high-performance floor and a memorable feature.”
Along with being an abundant resource, used coffee grounds have a few additional benefits that make it a good material for this sort of flooring. Per the press release, coffee grounds also provide enhanced shock absorption that will help protect a person’s joints during high-impact workouts, and it is also good at thermal regulation, which will help maintain “a comfortable floor temperature year-round.”
This is not the first time that coffee grounds have been used to create ground cover. We’ve seen it used to make road-building materials as well as stronger concrete, and we’ve even seen it used to make shoes, which is technically another thing you walk on so I’m going to count it. But this is the first time it has been used within the context of a gym.
So maybe the next time you’re going for a PR and the coffee isn’t quite helping you lift the heavy thing, it can at least keep you from setting off the lunkhead alarm whenever you unceremoniously drop it.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
