Brands
Sports flooring: the only part of a facility everybody touches, and the only one that cannot be replaced without closing the place.
Brands
In a sports facility almost everything can be replaced without closing: a machine, a goal, a light fitting. The floor cannot. Replacing it means emptying the hall, lifting what is there, waiting for laying and curing times, and reopening weeks later. That is why it is the item on which we advise against trading down.
Sports flooring is chosen on the activities, and the list is longer than people think: shock absorption for the joints, energy return, slip resistance - which must allow a pivot without causing a fall - ball rebound, and resistance to point loads from telescopic seating and wheeled equipment. Gerflor makes these floorings, and it is the range we lay most often in halls and gyms.
The uses contradict each other, and that is where the advice lies. A highly absorbent floor is comfortable for a gymnastics class and penalises a basketball match, where the ball has to bounce. A multi-use hall is therefore always a trade-off, better made explicitly against the real timetable than suffered on discovering that the floor does not suit the dominant activity.
The substrate decides the outcome as much as the covering. Levels, residual moisture in the slab, rising damp: a covering laid on a substrate that has not been tested blisters or lifts, and the manufacturer's warranty does not cover that. We therefore test before pricing the supply, and we say so when it calls for remedial work.
Line markings are decided last and lived with for twenty years. Too many lines make a hall illegible; too few mean reaching for the tape at every match. We start from the real list of disciplines hosted, and we rank it. See multi-sports spaces and fitness and cross-training, and the installation and maintenance pages.
The range
A sports hall floor, and a multi-use hall floor, is judged on four things: shock absorption, ball rebound, resistance to telescopic seating and wheeled loads.
The choice is made against the real timetable - who uses the hall, for how many hours, for what - and not against the most prestigious discipline.
In a fitness club the floor changes from zone to zone: free weights, selectorised machines, cardio, class studio. Thicknesses and types differ, and it is the junctions between zones that decide how well it lasts.
A badly made junction between two zones lifts within six months. It is the most common defect on gym floors we are asked to put right.
Residual moisture, levels, rising damp: the substrate is tested before ordering. A covering laid on an untested substrate is covered by nobody.
Laying has its own lead times - acclimatisation, welding of the seams, curing - and they do not compress. We place them in the programme working back from your opening date, see delivery.
Good to know
There is no floor that does everything equally well: a highly absorbent floor penalises ball rebound, a fast floor tires the joints. It is a trade-off, better made against the timetable than suffered.
We therefore start from the hours per discipline, not from the most visible one.
Often yes, sometimes no. It depends on its condition, on the resulting thickness and above all on what is underneath. The survey decides, and it is done before the quotation.
One to three weeks depending on the area and the type of laying, including acclimatisation and curing. Those times do not compress, which is why we set them in a quiet period rather than against an emergency.
Tell us the area, the disciplines hosted and their share of the timetable. We will tell you what suits, and what the substrate requires before anything is laid.
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