Our New Floor has Arrived … well sort of

At our Galway Gymnastics Training Centre, we had the benefit in April of the Irish Gymnastics floor lent to us for the month. Although it is a floor which has served it’s time (it’s about ten years old and gets packed/unpacked transported around the country about 30 times each year), the IG Floor was nevertheless a great improvement over floor training with the mats lying directly on the concrete surface. We had our eye on a lovely new floor from Gymnova, but after a good deal of debate we settled instead on a DIY floor.

We will build the 12m X 12m floor using  2 overlapped layers of 9mm baltic birch plywood above 1600 Palmer Power Springs and held together with velcro.  The system is promoted by Gibson Athletic in America, and one with which some of our coaches are familiar, having trained there.

We will be able to re-use the floor mats already in the training centre (these are owned by Galway Acrobatics, who also train in the centre), but we’ll need to get one more length in order to cover the full area.

The plywood and velcro have arrived already, but we’re expecting the springs to take a couple more weeks. The coaches are excited. Sam insisted on being the first to do a routine on the new floor…