Tempe, Ariz.— Ecore Athletic contributed to Arizona State University’s (ASU) remodeling of its 234,000-square-foot student fitness center. The goal was to help transform the fitness center into a space that fosters health, wellness, engagement and community for students and staff, according to the company.
“We were unhappy with the previous flooring that was installed in our weight rooms, which consist of dumbbells, free weights and lifting platforms,” said Dustin Soderman, associate director for facilities and operations at ASU. “The flooring was too slick with no traction and our weight machines would move all over the place. Also, the product didn’t dampen the noise very well either.”
Seeking a more advanced flooring solution, Soderman and his team researched optimal athletic flooring surfaces and contacted Advanced Exercise, a fitness equipment and facility design resource provider.
“We wanted a flooring product with a long life span that was easy to maintain, offered strong traction and had the ability to take a decent amount of punishment from weights dropping on it,” Soderman added.
The Advanced Exercise team recommended the installation of Ecore Athletic flooring for the ASU fitness center. Ecore Athletic offers a wide range of campus recreation flooring solutions, each engineered to provide safety, ergonomic and acoustic benefits, the company said. Ecore Athletic flooring is also engineered to support joints, reduce impact and return positive energy back to the body and is ideal for multi-use campus buildings, the company added.
Working with Soderman, Advanced Exercise specified two products from the performance collection of Ecore products: Performance Rally and Performance Beast Plus.
- Performance Rally: Tailored for heavy conditioning, Performance Rally is a 14.5mm vulcanized composition rubber (VCR) product. Using the patented itsTRU technology, a 2.5mm VCR wear layer is fusion bonded to a 12mm shock-absorbing VCR base layer to achieve a dynamic force reduction of 35.4%. The dual durometer system is designed to absorb the impact force related to aggressive functional training, providing an ergonomically advanced surface that works in concert with the body.
- Performance Beast Plus: Performance Beast Plus is designed for power, strength and functional training applications. The 14.5mm performance floor features a 2.5mm VCR surface fusion bonded to a 12mm VCR base layer using itsTRU technology. The result is a floor designed to withstand extreme weight impacts while minimizing bar bounce.
According to Ecore, the patented itsTRU technology is a manufacturing process that starts with VCR rubber that is diverted from landfills and incineration, and upcycled using a pressurized process that fusion bonds the VCR to any flooring surface. The technology is designed to develop and capture energy so that flooring surfaces can absorb force while returning usable energy back to people.
“The resiliency of Ecore flooring is outstanding and it’s also really great with noise abatement and acoustics as well,” Soderman said. “The fitness center is such a large area that it’s important to reduce noise wherever possible.”
Soderman added he is a fan of the customization options that Ecore offers. “We liked that we could customize the flooring to include our school logo and colors in the design. Ecore flooring offers customizable options, like logos, colors or even inlaid turf graphics, so we turned our student recreation flooring into a space that really showcases our school spirit.”