Intuitively Understanding Sports Flooring Elasticity

Understanding sports flooring elasticity can help you make better apples-to-apples flooring decisions.

“Hey, you know what would be fun this weekend? Mattress shopping!”

The chances of hearing that sentence over the next few weeks are pretty good. Every Memorial Day weekend, retailers try to get you to skip the neighborhood barbecue to go lay on a mattress, while a salesperson hovers over you asking “So, what do you think of this one?”

If you find yourself in this awkward predicament on the last weekend in May, here’s what you can do. As you stare up at the ceiling, think about that new athletic facility you’re designing at work, specifically the gym floor. If your wife or husband tells you that you seem distracted, just say you are “pondering the impact of sports surfaces on the development of student athletes.” Tell them “Abacus Sports said it was ok.” We’ll take the heat.

Believe it or not, mattress types are a perfect way to think about the elastic properties of sports floors. In fact, if you follow the analogies and explanations below, you’ll develop an intuitive understanding of flooring elasticity types, which will only add to your indoor sports design skills. Up first, memory foam and point-elastic flooring!

Point-Elastic Floors: Memory Foam Under Your Feet

As the salesperson leads you around the store, the first stop is usually a memory foam mattress. They are more modern, popular, and relatively inexpensive—all adjectives that can describe resilient sports floors, but the similarities go further. When body weight is applied to a memory foam mattress, it deforms almost exclusively at the immediate point of impact. That’s why memory foam mattresses contour around you, even sinking in more the longer you stay in one position.

That’s also point-elastic flooring in a nutshell. On resilient sports surfaces like Padenpor or Omnisports, the cushioning effect is engaged directly underfoot, leaving little displacement in the wider surrounding area. Think of the advertisement where someone places a glass of wine on a bed and then jumps on the bed. Point-elastic floors behave in a similar way on a different scale. If another player shoots a jump shot a few feet away, you probably won’t feel it. The key factor is that surface deformation only occurs in the immediate area around the impact.

Area-Elastic Floors: The Comfort of Tradition

If memory foam is not your cup of tea, you’ll probably be guided to the old-fashioned spring mattress. They’ve been around for decades, so why doubt a history of good results. As they say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Traditional spring mattresses are less precise than memory foam in how they respond to weight, but that doesn’t make them less comfortable. The sports flooring counterpart to a spring mattress is an area-elastic hardwood court.

With a series of shock pads beneath a hardwood surface, an area-elastic floor cushions the athlete by deforming over a much wider space than the immediate point of impact. Historically, area-elastic hardwood courts, like Robbins floors, have been the dominant choice for competitive basketball and volleyball. It’s hard to argue with tradition, especially since it still provides athletes with safety and comfort. The trade-off that comes with using area-elastic floors is gaining force reduction at the expense of more impact noise and court vibration. However, by no means does “traditional” equate to “inferior.”

Combi-Elastic Floors: The Best of Both Worlds

If you still haven’t decided which mattress to buy, the salesperson will make one last pitch for a hybrid model. In case you were wondering, our metaphor still holds up. A hybrid mattress has a similar structure to a combi-elastic sports floor. They both consist of an area-elastic cushioning support structure with a layer of point-elastic resilient material on the surface. Combi-elastic sports floors are not just a solution for those who can’t decide. They are growing in popularity, because athletes get the benefit of high force reduction with lower vibration and impact sound. Combi-elastic sports surfaces are in many ways the best of both worlds.

How Understanding Elasticity Helps

A quick disclaimer: this tongue-in-cheek comparison of mattresses and sports floors points to a way of understanding the mechanism of elasticity. Of course, the cushioning effects are quite different. It’s the structural similarities we are considering, not the actual properties. We wouldn’t recommend practicing free throws on your bed or taking a nap at center court.

However, we do want to convey the importance of identifying elasticity types in flooring. Not only is it beneficial to explain the differences to your clients, but it is also helpful in comparing different flooring brands in an apples-to-apples way. For example, comparing Tarkett Sports’ Omnisports to a Robbins hardwood court is difficult because of their fundamental differences. To avoid confusion, we recommend focusing on the elasticity type you want first, then comparing individual floors within the category. Of course, Abacus Sports is always here to help with sports flooring decisions. Give us a call or contact us at abacussports.com.