GMR Gymnastics Sales set up shop in 1978 in a small office we’d partitioned off in the back of the gym where GMR’s president and founder, Mike Raines, helped coach boys gymnastics.
A devoted gymnast in his high school years, Mike went on to compete gymnastics in college. He graduated with a degree and a job in accounting, but his passion lay in in his after hours work coaching young gymnasts and installing gymnastics equipment for a friend in the community.
Always thinking about how he could help his athletes improve their skills, Mike ran with an equipment idea he got from watching a film of Russian gymnasts training for the pommel horse using a stool type thing that looked like a mushroom. He welded together his own version in his dad’s metal shop from bits of metal, pipe and foam he found in a junkyard. He got his mom to sew up a vinyl cover and presto change-o! GMR Gymnastics Sales’ first piece of equipment, The Mushroom®, was born!
Mike saw other areas in which equipment and apparel were hard to come by for the small, but growing market of gymnastics enthusiasts. Mike sought to fix that, too. Kappy Bowers joined in 1979 and together they built a business. GMR began importing grips, then making their own, importing equipment, then making its own, importing apparel, then manufacturing its own under the name Ten-o.
As technologies like desktop publishing and the Internet came along, GMR Gymnastics Sales dove in and leveraged them to reach a growing and wider audience of gymnasts; gymnastics clubs, gyms and Y’s; coaches and parents. What was once a snail mail catalogue phone and fax order business grew into the gymnastics community oriented e-commerce site that is Ten-o.com.
Ten-o.com is proud to offer in-house manufactured By GMR brand equipment, as well as that of other names in the industry such as Spieth America, AAI and Dollamur. We’re proud to outfit gymnasts and offer gymnastics themed gifts and toys that allow gymnastics enthusiasts to revel in their love of the sport. More than equipment and apparel, we also use our founders and employees’ decades of experience performing and coaching gymnastics to help gym and club owners to design and equip the gymnastics facilities of their dreams!
In recent years, we’ve expanded our offerings to help other practitioners of kinetic fitness and expression create their dream spaces by offering ballet barres, marley floors, cheer and martial arts geared equipment and mats.
We are proud to serve the athletic and fitness of goals of youth and adults, amateur and professional across the world.
We started this blog to help members of these communities understand their equipment and apparel; as well as expand the possibilities of their businesses. We hope you enjoy!
TEN-O Gymnastics 