Gym benches get sweaty and nasty very quickly, so it’s important to clean and disinfect them properly. The good news is they aren’t nearly as complicated as cleaning a treadmill because there are no mechanical or electrical parts to worry about.
Follow these simple tips to keep your gym bench clean, fresh and looking great for years to come!
Your clothes and skin will come in direct contact with your gym bench. This makes it extremely important to understand what chemicals you’re using to clean your gym bench because they will eventually make their way onto your clothes and skin too.
Many cleaning products use quaternary ammonium compounds, or quats, as their active ingredient to clean and disinfect surfaces. This is particularly concerning for gyms because their thorough and frequent cleaning procedures make exposure that much more significant.
Quats have been shown to cause skin issues such as eczema. Quats have also been shown to trigger asthma attacks in people who currently have asthma, as well as people who have never had asthma before. If that’s not frightening enough, quats have been shown to disrupt the reproductive systems in both male and female mice - and have not been studied to see if the same issues occur in humans.
Still feel comfortable using quats on your gym equipment? We didn’t think so! That’s why Vapor Fresh products are always 100% free of quats and instead rely on cleaner active ingredients.
By now it should be clear you should avoid quats as much as possible due to their health concerns. But what about alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, two other common active ingredients in many cleaning products?
While alcohol and hydrogen peroxide aren’t nearly as concerning from a health safety perspective, they may be too corrosive for your gym bench and could potentially reduce it’s life expectancy. This is particularly true for the upholstered surface part of the bench, which will crack and fade much earlier than necessary when exposed to alcohol and hydrogen peroxide cleaners. Therefore it’s best to avoid those two chemicals as well when cleaning your gym bench.
One common misconception about alcohol is that it’s the best option. The confusion here comes from conflating cleaning hands with cleaning surfaces. For hands, alcohol-based hand sanitizers are the gold standard, but for many reasons, killing germs on surfaces and killing germs on hands require different chemistries. When it comes to cleaning hands, stick with the alcohol-based hand sanitizers, but when it comes to cleaning your gym bench it’s best to avoid alcohol-based cleaners.
If you’re avoiding quats for health reasons, and avoiding alcohol and hydrogen peroxide to prevent early deterioration of your gym bench, what should you be using to clean and disinfect your gym bench? At Vapor Fresh, we believe plant based citric acid disinfectants are the one of the best options around.
For starters, plant based citric acid is just as effective at killing germs as other active ingredients. In fact, Vapor Fresh Gym Wipes are EPA registered to kill 99.9% of germs twice as fast as many other brands.
From a safety profile, if you compare Vapor Fresh Gym Wipes safety data sheet with other brands, you’ll also see some major differences. Our wipes are in the lowest EPA toxicity category to the point where they don’t technically need a warning label on them!
One last thing to consider when choosing a product to clean your gym bench is to ensure you’re using a disinfectant as opposed to a sanitizer. Despite the terms “disinfecting” and “sanitizing” being used interchangeably by many people, disinfectants and sanitizers are not the same thing.
From a regulatory perspective, disinfectants provide much more cleaning power than sanitizers. Disinfectants have more stringent requirements to pass and are effective against bacteria, viruses and fungi. Sanitizers have easier requirements to make it to market and are only registered against bacteria but not viruses or fungi. That’s why areas which require more thorough germ control like hospitals and gyms use disinfectants rather than sanitizers. Considering dangerous strains of germs such as MRSA have been shown to live on gym equipment, it’s imperative to use a disinfectant to keep everyone safe.
Top gyms across the country trust Vapor Fresh Gym Wipes thanks to all the benefits above - the safety profile, the effectiveness and the surface compatibility.
If you need large jumbo rolls of disinfecting wipes, our Vapor Fresh Gym Wipes 1200ct Rolls would be the perfect and cost-effective option.
If you’re looking for wipes for your home gym or small fitness studio and don’t need jumbo rolls, our Vapor Fresh Home Gym Wipe Canisters would be the best option for you.
