So, what’s a hot yoga studio owner to do? 

Well, we have three practical solutions to their problem.

In this post, let’s just look at the bamboo alternative.  We’ve talked a lot about bamboo, but really haven’t addressed its usefulness for yoga.  Certainly its Eastern aesthetic and green renewable properties fit right into the yoga motif.  But its physical properties make it equally appropriate.

See, as we’ve discussed, bamboo is a grass, and not a hardwood.  As such, it does not have the expansion and contraction to the degree that wood does.  When wood gets wet or is exposed to high humidity, the grain will absorb water and cause the board to expand and this expansion can cause boards to cup.  Of course the opposite occurs when it dries out and the contraction can cause boards to gap and even crack.  Not so with bamboo.  Yes, the boards will expand with moisture, but not to the same degree.  It will also move back in place much faster when it is dried out.  Since it is not moving as dramatically, it is also less likely to crack.

Same goes with water from perspiration on top of the boards.  This can often cause cupping of the boards in a wood floor, but it is unlikely to affect bamboo much at all.  In fast, we have done lab testing where we have taken a board and laid a soaking wet towel on both bamboo and hardwood and left it there for an entire day.  In the hardwood samples, we found significant damage to the face of the board, even after the board was allowed to dry.  In the bamboo sample, we saw absolutely no effect.

So there are some points in favor of bamboo for your yoga flooring.  In the next post, we’ll look at some of the other new alternatives for yoga rooms.

We’ve got some exciting new things going on and we’re sharing them with you as fast as we can. Already, you will see that our Flecks line of standard colors has expanded well beyond the five that we had last year, into 20 standard colors, made up of higher concentration of colors and new combinations.

Also, you should see that we’ve expanded our list of categories into yoga to reflect the increasing importance of that sector of the market. We also have a new product to offer to that market – Zebra Yoga Flooring. This matting material is great for especially the hot yoga disciplines, since it can be affected in no way by the increased humidity that these classes require. It also provides a resilient surface that is easy to maintain and won’t support the growth of bacteria.

We’ve also included Pavigym – a product we’ve known about for a long time, but have only recently been able to offer to you. It’s also great for yoga, as well as for group exercise, and can be put in place temporarily or permanently. Pavigym made quite a splash at IHRSA with their inventive functional zone programming.

We’re looking to provide more and more options in response to the needs of our customers and continually looking for innovations to be made available to the market. If there’s a type of surface out there that you’re looking for and don’t see somewhere on our website, please let us know. We’ll find a way to track it down!

Problem with most kettlebells is that you can’t often do them in a traditional group-exercise studio.  A participant accidentally dropping one of those is going to leave quite an impression on a hardwood floor that you find in most group-exercise rooms.  In fact, we’ve had clubs that are heavily involved in kettlebell trading completely avoid a hardwood altogether for just that reason.

What they ask us about instead is a rubber floor for group exercise.  Well, we don’t really recommend that.  Rubber is great for providing resilience need for group exercise – especially the thick rubber floors with an air space below – and it certainly won’t be dented by kettlebells.  The problem is the traction; rubber floors’ surfaces are just too aggressive..  A person sliding back and forth on a rubber floor, while wearing rubber-soled shoes, has a great risk of catching their foot on the floor and either pronating or supinating the ankle.  By contrast, a wood floor is designed to allow the foot to slide easily across the surface.

So, what’s the solution?  Well, there’s no perfect one, but like my earlier treatise on hand weights, purchasing rubber-coated kettlebells can go a long way to allowing wood floors and kettlebells to more peacefully coexist.  Like free weights, many manufacturers who make steel kettlebells also manufacture those made with urethane.  Kettlebells can still be dropped and may dent a floor, but this goes a long way to prevent the problem.

Bamboo, being a type of flooring from the east, and technically being a grass rather than a hardwood, has some unique terminology that up to now, we’ve not been familiar with.  For instance, the “knuckles”, as I refer to them, that we see in bamboo instead of knots in hardwoods, are actually known as nodes.  A bamboo stalk itself is known as a culm. 

While all of that is a little different from what we are used to, it’s the term “carbonized” that really throws me.  It describes a product that is darker than the so-called “natural” bamboo. For a product that is supposed to be extremely friendly to the environment, the term “carbonized” sounds as though this particular product produces, or is produced from carbon gases, when neither is really the case.  Carbonizing is the process in which the strips of bamboo are boiled, bringing the natural sugars to the surface.  It seems to me that the term “carmelizing” would serve us better, and reflect the fact that it is simply changing the color of bamboo not affecting the environment.  We’ve grown to use the terms interchangeably here for just that reason.

Strandwoven is another term that is new to most of us.  It reflects the actual weaving together of strands of bamboo, which are then compressed.  The result is a floor that has a much more varied pattern to it and, because of being glued under such compression, unusual hardness.  While bamboo is harder than oak or maple, the strandwoven bamboo is almost twice as hard as the other varieties.

If you’ve run into any other unusual terms about bamboo, we’d love to hear what you’ve heard of.

Yes, I said tossed. Like from waist high and about five feet away. They landed soundly on the expensive hardwood floor with a thud.

I couldn’t believe it – these folks were literally throwing 10 lb. hex head weights to the hardwood floor! I wondered, half-aloud, how they would feel if I walked into their living rooms and tossed a couple of these weights down onto their pretty hardwoods. My bet was that not too many would be happy about it if I did it once. Not to mention, grabbing twenty of my friends and having them also repeat this exercise several times a day.

As you can imagine, even though it had been installed only a very short time, this floor was pretty beat up.

Participants will do what they do, and you can only control so much of that. You can try to ask them not to throw the weights in the group exercise room, but instructors shouldn’t be the police. And really, it should be common courtesy not to toss pointed heavy objects onto a hardwood floor.

But, there are a couple of things that you can do to alleviate this. One is to trade in those hex head dumbbells for, well, almost anything else. A hex head dumbbell will tear up any surface over time – even thick rubber flooring and cement floors. If you ever find the need to tunnel out of somewhere, I hope that you’re equipped with a hex head dumbbell. You should be out in no time.

The same companies who manufacture hex head weights, also manufacture rounded dumbbells that have no obvious disadvantages. Better yet are the rounded dumbbells that are urethane or rubber coated. You can’t prevent people from tossing weights, or even just dropping them, but you can make it easier for your floors to withstand them.

But I realize that our installation crews aren’t the cheapest group you can find.  There’s a reason for that.  These guys are factory-trained and there aren’t that many who can do the job, time after time, to the level of quality that is expected of them.  Because there are few of them who are qualified, they often have to travel over several states to get to your facility.

Now, you might well be tempted to hire someone from a local flooring company who is cheaper.  That is always your option, but I would recommend that you not.  Those local flooring guys may well be experts at installing floors in homes or businesses, but sports floors are a different type of product and require unique installation techniques.  Too often we find local flooring guys disregarding our installation instructions and simply installing the floor in a way that they think is best, and the customer ends up with a floor that either performs less than it should, or isn’t as attractive as it could be.  We don’t want that, and we know that you don’t either.

I need to point out that we provide these installation crews as a service to our customers and not as a profit center for ourselves.  We make very little on installation, so the added expense is virtually all going to the installers and his crew.  In fact, scheduling and coordinating installers is a lot of work for us, but we understand that it is a necessary service that we can provide you, our customers, with.  And it’s worth it to us to make sure that you have an installation that you can be proud of for years to come.

So don’t let the cost of an install prevent you from getting the most out of the flooring investment you’ve made.

Yes, in every case, you can have your personnel install our floors.  We’ll be happy to send you installation instructions and, if they are followed to the letter, will make for a good looking installation. We’ve put a lot of time into these installation instructions and tried to think of every particular situation, using our knowledge of hundreds of installations, so please don’t just think that you know what you’re doing and dive right in without ever consulting the instructions until it is too late.  In fact, I’d encourage you to read all of the installation instructions BEFORE you install the floor.  We intentionally make them as brief as we possibly can for just that reason and they will give you a rough idea of what you might encounter before you get there.

If you have questions, please give us a call.  Everyone here has been involved with the installation of at least a few floors, so they know the answers to your questions – even the unusual ones.

One tip I can give you is to not try to get too much done in a day.  The details, especially when you are finishing the installation, are what make the difference between a good looking installation and a bad one.  If your folks are getting tired, they’ll start making sloppy mistakes, or not caring as much about the appearance of the installation as much as they did when you started. And, just when it looks like your floor is done, that’s when you have to look at the finishing touches like clean-up and baseboards and transitions that make all the difference. 

Finally, if your folks get into the installation and find that it is beyond their scope of expertise, or if the floor is not looking the way that you think it should, tell them to stop working.  We have installers around the country and they will be more than happy to finish the job for you.

Over the last year, we’ve learned a lot and are continuing to strive to ensure that everything we offer to you is the very best in service, quality, and performance.  We realize that we can never stop striving and hope that you will continue to be with us to help guide us along the way. 

We wish you all the joy of the season and look forward to an even more successful year next year.

Of course, the thing about turning on the heater is that it more quickly dries water in the air and this dramatically reduces the humidity in your building.  In fact, over time, like after an especially hard or long winter, the humidity never has an opportunity to rise at all.  Surprisingly, this can make life really difficult for your hardwood floors.

You see, a hardwood floor expands and contracts based on the humidity of the environment that it is installed in.  The fibers in the wood fill up with moisture when it’s humid, and shrink back down when it’s not.  When the humidity is greatly reduced through heating, the boards become much narrower and somewhat shorter.  In a nailed-in floor, this often leads to noticeable gaps between floor boards and at the ends of the boards.  In a free-floating floor, this means that the floor will often shrink away from the wall, creating wide gaps around the outside of the room.  In some extreme cases, it will actually cause cracking within the boards itself.

Most wood flooring manufacturers suggest that you keep the humidity between 35%-50%, which can be a bit of a challenge in the winter.  If you don’t have humidifiers in your existing HVAC system, it’s not a bad idea to get a portable humidifier to put in a corner of the room, just for the worst of the winter months.  Don’t count on just the activity in the room and the sweat to keep the humidity high.  It does boost humidity, but only temporarily and not enough to help the flooring.  An alternative is to turn the heat way down at night, or when no one is using the room.  It not only helps keep humidity higher, but also reduces your electric bills!

So, as we approach winter, keep those relative humidity guidelines in mind and look for strategies to keep the moisture up.  Your floors will thank you.

Let’s first look at the construction of the boards themselves.  In this market, there are two main types of hardwood flooring – solid and engineered.  Solid flooring is a pretty self-explanatory term, indicating that the boards are made of solid pieces of wood.  The advantage of a solid floor is that after years of use, the floor can be sanded down and refinished a number of times.  These types of boards are often nailed to a subfloor, or “sleepers”, which are 2” X 3” strips of wood that are laid under the hardwood.

As I mentioned, the other type of flooring is an engineered product.  Until a few years ago, this was more commonly referred to as a “laminate floor”.  Basically, about half the thickness of the board is made up of plywood, with solid pieces of hardwood glued to the top of it.  Installation of an engineered product is referred to as “free-floating’ since the boards are installed simply by being glued to the adjoining boards, and not secured to the subfloor.  Thus the floor is considered to be “floating” above the subfloor, typically over a foam layer or strips.  One of the great things about a floating system is that it is allowed to move up and down on the foam, making it more resilient. 

Our wood systems are unique, in that they take the best parts of a solid – the ability to be refinished a number of times – and are assembled in a way that it is still free-floating – which is more resilient.  Our boards are held together by using a removable installation clip, which also firmly holds the boards to each other, but also allows you to take up and relocate your flooring without loss of your initial flooring investment.

Sound perfect for group exercise?  Well, that’s what the testing seems to tell us.