Best TV for Home Gyms & Exercise Rooms

Adding a TV to your exercise room or home gym can be an excellent idea for several reasons:

Buying a TV for your exercise room isn’t the same as buying a TV for other rooms. Different purpose, different concerns, and different considerations. We’ll help you make sense of the situation by covering the most important topics when picking a TV for your home gym:

TV Placement for Exercise

Before you can calculate the best TV size, you’ll need to know where you’re placing the TV:

If you only have one piece of equipment, like a treadmill, it’s easy: place the TV slightly above eye level at a direct, head-on angle. If you’ve got more than one piece of equipment, and/or do a variety of exercises, you’ll need to make a tough decision.

Where will the TV enjoy the most frequent direct viewing? This is probably the best place for the TV: constantly craning your neck to look at a TV while exercising is uncomfortable at best and in the worst case scenario could cause serious injury.

If there isn’t one obvious place to put your Home Gym TV, consider dividing your budget and buying two or more smaller TVs that are each optimally placed. This is especially effective for treadmills and other cardio equipment, allowing you to place a small TV for close, direct viewing while placing another TV for weights or general room enjoyment.

If you’d prefer a single TV, consider placing it further from straight ahead long-duration equipment like treadmills. Although it’s tempting to place it as close as possible, putting distance between a treadmill and a decidedly larger TV allows it to serve multiple workout stations, viewing angles, and viewing distances.

Best TV Size for Home Gyms

Once you’ve decided whether to buy a single TV for the entire room or multiple smaller TVs for different stations, you’ll need to calculate the best size for each TV.

To calculate the best TV size for your home gym:

So for example, if the distance between your TV location and exercise spot is 9 feet:

These calculations intentionally produce smaller suggested TV sizes than living rooms and media rooms and for good reason: creating an immersive TV experience while exercising can cause dizziness and motion sickness. Let the workout remain the focal point and accept that a slightly smaller TV is better for your health, which is why you’re exercising in the first place.

TV Mount vs. TV Stand

Wherever you decide to put the TV in your home gym, you’ll almost always want to mount it to the wall instead of using a TV stand. That’s because TVs for exercise should be positioned between eye level and 15 degrees above eye level for comfortable viewing.

It’s possible to find a tall piece of furniture that would meet these needs, but the best TV mounts are also able to swivel, turn, move up, down, out, in, and adjust in lots of different ways to accommodate the various exercises, equipment, and viewing angles in your room.

TV Mounting Height

The best guideline to use for TV Mounting Height is to place the middle of the TV 65-inches above the ground. This is accurate for all TV sizes because it measures the distance to the TV’s center, rather than the top or bottom of the TV. But don’t hang your TV on the wall just yet!

How to Calculate TV Mounting Height

If you’ll be the primary person using the home gym, you’ll want to cater the TV mounting height to your personal preference and equipment. Are you especially tall or short? Your TV Height should reflect these differences.

To determine the optimal TV Mounting height for your home gym:

4 Pitfalls to Avoid

Tall & Short People
If the gym will serve multiple people, average their heights and subtract 5 inches to ascertain average eye level. Place the middle of the TV slightly above this point to best accommodate the majority.

Machines add height
Don’t forget: your “eye-level” will change if you’re standing on a treadmill, sitting on a bike, or using equipment that requires a step-up or seated position!

Follow the TV mount instructions
It’s likely that your TV mount isn’t in the exact center of your TV, so to make sure it sits at the perfect height once you’ve hung it on the wall, follow the directions that come with your specific TV mounting hardware.

Low Ceilings
If you’ve got a low ceiling and a large TV, make sure to measure several times. It’s possible that your perfect TV height places the top of your TV through the roof- which should be avoided for obvious reasons. In this case you’ll most likely need to choose a smaller TV.

Gym Size & TV Viewing Angle

If you’re only putting 1 TV in your home gym and you’ve got multiple pieces of workout equipment and stations, you’ll want that single TV to be viewable from many different angles.

TV Mounts that Swivel/Turn/Rotate

The easiest way to accommodate wide viewing angles is to buy one of the best TV mounts for wide angles since you’ll most likely be mounting your TV. This works especially well for small rooms where only 1 or 2 people will be working out.

TVs with Good Viewing Angles

If you’ve got a large room or numerous people working out simultaneously, you might find that a rotating TV mount doesn’t suffice. Constantly having to reposition the screen while half the room can’t see the screen isn’t the best case scenario.

In this case, you’ll want to buy a TV with screen technology that has great viewing angles out of the box. OLEDs have the best viewing angles, followed by QLED, and lastly LED-LCD TVs.

Multiple TVs

The last option sounds more expensive but it doesn’t have to be: purchasing multiple smaller TVs is a great way to get the optimal viewing experience at various locations in your home gym without having to compromise.

Unlike a living room where the focal point should be on the viewing experience, home gym TVs are secondary to exercising, so settling for less than cutting-edge technology is not only acceptable- it’s recommended.

TV Specs & Best Models

You might be inclined to buy a TV based on the advice we provide in our comprehensive TV Buying Guide, but buying a TV for your home gym is a bit different.

If you insist, go ahead and get the biggest and best TV possible, but we’d argue that in your home gym more than anywhere else, the goal should be to find a TV that provides good value.

Here are specs to keep an eye on:

Audio Upgrades

Thinner and thinner TVs means less and less space for audio components, which has led to a sub-par audio experience from even today’s best TVs. Fitness enthusiasts often want to jam out to music videos, blast play-by-play for a sports game, or crank the volume to whatever level drowns out the noise of their exercise.

Three great options to consider:

We don’t personally enjoy wearing headphones while we exercise (unless absolutely necessary), and for most people a full home audio system is overkill; we recommend investing in a plug-and-play soundbar like Sonos which will look great, sound great, and offer a level of simplicity that most people prefer.

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