It’s Gym Time!

Not all gymnastics gym installs are created equal. As any adult can atest: life is full of surprises. With Mike and Grant on hand to oversee construction contractors and install your gymnastics club’s equipment, foreseen and unforeseen architectural easter eggs can be worked around, or in the case of Gymtime in Pennsylvania, worked up and over or drilled through.

Gymnastics training pits must be 6 feet deep for physics and safety reasons. 5.5 feet ain’t gonna cut it. Alas, when digging in to create Gym Time’s gymnastics pit’s pit, it was discovered this was also the location of one of the building’s footers.

A building footer is a crucial part of a building’s foundation. It’s what creates the support for structures to build upwards. Picture a concrete column with a wider base at the bottom and that’s basically it. Kind of like your own leg that doesn’t just end at the ankle, but spreads out into your wider, longer foot-er to support your body.

One of the footers for Gym Time’s gymnastics pit lives at 5.5 feet under their building, inconveniently, exactly where they planned their 6 foot deep pit hole. Obviously, digging another six inches under it wouldn’t be a good idea. One does not argue with a building’s footer supports. So, what the contractors did was pour a six inch lip above the intended edges of the pit to achieve that vital 6 foot depth.

However, that meant that the equipment served by the pit: the rod floor, uneven bars, single bar trainer and vault, needed to be raised to lead into it on the same plane.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way! Enter the plywood deck!

Frequently, for varying reasons, gyms will build a raised deck on which to put their equipment. Usually, it’s because a pit hole can’t be dug, so they, as in this case, build up to compensate for facility features.

While, the plywood deck provided a viable work-around for the footer issue, it did raise it’s own complications in that the equipment floor plates cannot be anchored into mere plywood. Luckily, Mike and Grant bring many, many tools, bolts, drills and bits along when they do an install which allowed them to drill and anchor the equipment floor plates safely into the concrete floor below.

After 40 years in the business, Mike and Grant know how to identify and vanquish the challenges that arise when even the best laid plans meet their execution in reality.

That also meant that when it turned out there was sheet rock with insulation behind it on the back wall of the pit, Mike and Grant were able to engineer safe solutions to drill through it and get the pit frame safely anchored into the concrete support wall behind it all.

After a year in the works of Mike and Grant collaborating with the owners to design, plan and place the equipment, Gym Time’s new gymnastics facility turned out beautifully!

We are very proud they chose ByGMR brand equipment to kit out their exquisite gym including: our spring floor, carpet, 2 inch EVA foam (the springier stuff), rod floor, star bars, uneven bars, beams, single bar trainer and spotting deck, strap bar and our sag bed pit system. All the mats are ByGMR, as well. We were happy to help them work in their own, previously used JF vaulting table to trim costs where they could.

Our gymnastics customized, 3-D computer rendering design software knows all the dimensions of any piece of gymnastics equipment, ours or that of another company, and Mike and Grant stand ready to help you design and install the gym of your dreams!