An outdoor platform is a great way to simultaneously increase your home gym space and have a place where you can enjoy fresh air while working out. They are fairly simple and cheap to build. But it does require some grunt work. I would recon you can build one for <1500 Euros. In this post, I will take you through how I built my 9 square meter outdoor platform, and what I learned from that process.

Making room for the platform

First of, you should dig to a depth of 35 cm. This leaves room for a bottom layer of ~25 cm of compacted aggregate course, a middle layer of 8-10 cm thick concrete tiles and a top layer of 15 mm thick rubber mats. This is the hardest part of the build.

You can then build a wooden frame out of pressure treated (or heat-treated) timber that you place along the border of your square hole. This helps make your platform more stable and it adds to the finish of your platform.

Building the training platform layer by layer

Next you add your 25 cm of aggregate course. You can estimate how much aggregate course you will need to order by multiplying depth x width x length.

You can then rent a plate vibrator for a day for around 20€. This is not rocket science. Walk around and compact the aggregate course until it has settled and you have a straight surface.

As you can see from the picture above, I did not initially add concrete tiles between the aggregate course and the rubber mats. If you only do body weight movements on your platform, this will probably be fine. But if you want to lift and drop weights on the platform, you should now add a layer of 8-10 cm thick concrete tiles.

On top of the concrete tiles you place your rubber mats. Make sure that each row of mats is sligthly shifted compared the the neighbouring rows, so you never have to align four corners. This will make the rubber mats less prone to moving around etc.

I then chose to do some finishing touches around the platform to make the area more welcoming.

I hope this was helpful! I loved using my 3 x 3 meter platform during the spring and summer. I once had 8 people training at the platform simultaneously. But I eventually had to remove my outdoor platform to make room for my current home gym v.3.0.

Comment below if you have more tips on building outdoor platforms.