My downstairs neighbor can hear every home workout

I started doing short exercise videos in my living room because the setup was nearly frictionless. Move the coffee table, open the laptop, finish before dinner. The routine worked for six weeks. Then my downstairs neighbor left a polite note.

She wrote that repeated thumping between 6 and 7 p.m. was shaking her ceiling light and asked whether I could keep it down. There was no accusation, just an underlined “especially Tuesdays.” Tuesday is the video with jumps.

I felt embarrassed because I had been congratulating myself for exercising at home without considering that my floor was somebody else's ceiling. I placed a thick mat under the laptop and chose a low-impact option the next day. The mat helped with my feet but did not tell me what she could hear. Apartment sound is invisible from the room creating it.

I could remove jumping entirely. Most videos offer modifications, although I sometimes spend more attention translating the sequence than doing it. I could exercise earlier, but my neighbor works from home and evening may actually be less disruptive. I could speak with her, which is probably the adult answer, yet knocking on the door to negotiate acceptable thumping feels awkward.

The lease has general quiet-hour language, but I am not interested in proving that 6:30 p.m. is legally mine. I want a routine that does not require another person to tolerate her light fixture rattling. At the same time, ordinary apartment life cannot be silent.

My proposed plan is to apologize, ask whether the low-impact version was noticeable and exchange phone numbers for a one-week test. If it remains disruptive, I will keep jumping activities outside the apartment and use the living room for quieter movement.

Is that reasonable, or does asking her to monitor the test make the problem her job? How have people tested noise across apartments without escalating a considerate note into a building dispute?