On this page
  1. Why the floor carries it and the walls do not
  2. Ranking the moves by what hits the floor
  3. Three levers that keep it hard
  4. Three routines built from them
  5. The hour is the cheapest change you have
  6. What the surface does not change
  7. Ceilings, walls, and the studio case
  8. What this does not settle

Training in a flat is easy enough. What makes it awkward is the question running underneath it: is the unit below hearing this. Most answers to that are a list of moves that do not involve jumping, which handles the obvious case and leaves you with a session that gets quietly easier every week, because “quiet” has been allowed to mean “gentle”. It does not have to. This is about keeping the session hard while keeping it off the ceiling below, and about the two levers that are free and almost never mentioned.

Why the floor carries it and the walls do not

Two different things leave your flat. Airborne sound, music and voices, goes through the air and around doors. Impact goes into the structure: your foot lands, the slab takes the vibration and lets it out again as sound in the room below. Acoustical Surfaces makes the practical point, which is that a fix for one does nothing for the other.

So the neighbour is not really hearing your session. They are feeling it, second hand, through the building. Which is also why you cannot check it. It is happening in a room you are not in.

One country publishes a number. South Korea caps direct impact at a one-minute average of 39 dB(A) by day and 34 dB(A) at night, tightened by 4 dB in 2022 after a Korea Environment Institute study of 100 people found 30 percent annoyed at the old daytime 43. That figure gets measured downstairs, by someone qualified, with proper equipment. You cannot hold a phone up to it, and no mat comes with it. The four quantities this topic quotes, and why none converts into another, are separated in the flooring guide.

One number in the Korean data should change how you plan. Of 69,272 complaints logged between 2012 and 2021, running and walking sounds account for 67.7 percent. Not dropped weights. Ordinary footfall, repeated.

Ranking the moves by what hits the floor

This is a ranking by floor contact, not a scale of loudness, and there is no threshold anywhere in it. What it tells you is the order in which to give things up.

  • Almost nothing reaches the slab. Wall sits, planks, dead bugs, slow tempo squats, split squats, glute bridges, standing band work. No foot leaves the floor with any force.
  • Depends on how you do it. Marching in place, light step-ups, fast bodyweight squats. Controlled, on a mat, in shoes, these sit near the bottom. Rushed and barefoot on bare boards they climb.
  • Heavy contact, whatever you put underneath. Jumping jacks, burpees, skipping, running in place, weights set down hard. These are the footfall category the complaint data is built out of.

The pattern to notice in the middle group: the same exercise moves up or down the ranking depending on tempo and footwear. That is a lot of room to work with before anything has to be cut. I’d put cushioned trainers on before deleting marching from a session. Barefoot reads as the considerate option and, for anything with a foot strike in it, it is the wrong way round.

Three levers that keep it hard

Here is the part the no-jump lists skip. Three ways to make a bodyweight session genuinely difficult, none of which changes what your feet are doing to the floor.

Slow the lowering phase to three to five seconds. Time under tension goes up, speed comes down, and speed is where the impact was.

Work one side at a time. A split squat or a single-leg glute bridge roughly doubles the load through the working leg without adding equipment or a single extra foot strike.

Hold the hardest position. An isometric hold in the bottom of a squat or the top of a bridge is the quietest thing in the room and among the least pleasant.

I would reach for these before touching the exercise list, because they preserve the training and the list does not. A session of slow split squats and long holds is harder than the fast circuit it replaced, and it is quieter.

Three routines built from them

Each runs in under 15 minutes with nothing but a mat.

  • The wall-sit ladder, 10 minutes. Three rounds of: 30 s wall sit, 60 s marching, 45 s wall sit, 60 s marching, 60 s wall sit, 60 s marching. Add 15 s to each wall sit each week.
  • The unilateral series, 15 minutes. Three rounds of: 8 split squats per leg, 10 single-leg glute bridges per side, 6 one-arm wall push-ups per side, 20 s side plank per side. 60 s rest between rounds. Lower the push-up angle each week.
  • The slow circuit, 12 minutes. Three rounds of: 10 squats with a 3 s descent, 12 plank shoulder taps, 8 dead bugs per side, 8 reverse lunges per leg. 60 s rest. Extend the squat descent to 5 s, then add a 1 s pause at the bottom.

Any of those, three or four times a week, sits inside the WHO’s recommendation of at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week for adults. The constraint here is the floor, not the training effect.

The hour is the cheapest change you have

Nobody writes about this and it costs nothing. The same session at eleven in the morning and at half past ten at night is two completely different events for the person below, and the exercise did not change.

  • Before 08:00. Holds and slow work. No marching, and nothing set down hard.
  • 09:00 to 18:00. Everything on the list. The building is awake and ambient noise is doing some of the work for you.
  • 18:00 to 22:00. Drop the heavy-contact group. Skip marching if a small child goes to bed below you.
  • After 22:00. Stretching, breathing, mobility. The WHO’s guidance for a bedroom at night, from any source, is below 30 dB(A) for decent sleep, and while that is a guideline about a room rather than a rule about you, it is a fair description of what somebody downstairs is trying to have.

Quiet hours themselves are a household and building matter, not a national one. Many European buildings run 22:00 to 07:00, plenty of tenancy agreements set their own, and the honest advice is to read yours rather than to trust a schedule from a website. If yours is silent on it, I’d treat the sleeping habits of the flat below as the real schedule, because that is the one that generates the knock on the door.

Move the session earlier before you change a single exercise. It is free, it is reversible, and it shifts the outcome more than swapping one squat variation for another. Nothing was measured to arrive at that ordering; it is a judgment about how apartment life actually runs.

What the surface does not change

A mat is worth having. On bare boards it takes the sharpness out of a footfall, it stops a bench foot marking the finish, and it makes floor work bearable. Those are real.

What it does not do is make the heavy-contact group appropriate above someone. No thickness of foam turns a burpee into a quiet exercise, and the reason is in the material rather than in the effort: a comfort mat has neither the mass nor the stiffness to interrupt what goes into a slab. I would not spend money on a thicker mat for that reason, and I would spend it on one that grips, which is a problem a mat can actually solve. That is a flooring question with its own answer, and it is not solved by buying a thicker version of the mat you already own. Which mat is worth having, and why density rather than millimetres decides it, is in choosing an exercise mat.

Bands and adjustable dumbbells fit a quiet programme on one condition, which is that they get set down rather than dropped. The adjustable dumbbells comparison covers what that rules in and out. To run the whole thing with nothing at all, there is a no-equipment workout space.

To put your own move, surface, hour and footwear together and see which change shifts the ranking most, the planner below does that.

Apartment impact-risk planner

Pick your situation. The result updates as you change any answer and names the one fix that helps most.

Impact-transmission risk: -

FitVilo editorial planning model. It ranks risk from weights FitVilo chose; it does not measure or predict a noise level. See methodology.

The tools page states what sits behind each of its four calculators, including which parts of this ranking are FitVilo’s editorial weighting rather than measurement.

Ceilings, walls, and the studio case

Not everyone has this problem. A top floor with nothing below is the free case. Over a shop or an office you get the full range in business hours and a tighter evening.

A studio with a shared wall turns the problem sideways, and turns one piece of advice with it. A wall sit sends almost nothing anywhere. A band anchored to pull against the party wall sends plenty, and it is exactly what gets added by someone who has correctly worked out that they should stop jumping. That case has its own routines in thin-wall workout routines, and the wider time-budget framing is in staying active in a small apartment.

What this does not settle

None of this tells you what your neighbour hears. That needs a measurement taken down there. All the ranking, the hour and the levers do is put the things you control in a sensible order.

So: move the session earlier, then make it slower and more one-legged rather than shorter. If a complaint has already landed, that is a conversation, not a shopping problem, and it usually goes better than people expect. If you have an injury or a medical condition, talk to a clinician first.

Sources