Century Puzzle Mats???

[G95champ]

Does anyone have them in your dojo? If so how are they? Are the slick? Do they move alot? Are they hard to fit together?

 

Reason I am asking I spoke to a guy today about opening up a dojo and hte floor of the building he has is concrete. Which as most of you know is murder on the joints. I have done it before but its just not a good mix. So I was looking at these puzzle mats in century and how they fitted together. They look pretty good but you can't tell until you are on them.

 

So if anyone has any info or has trained on them let me know.

 

Thanks.

[omnifinite]

We have puzzle mats I believe (the interlocking squares that are about 2'x2'?), but not Century brand. They aren't slick, I doubt you do anything more than press to fit them together, and I don't know if they slide, because we have about 30 of them, so it may be too massive to do much sliding by then. I haven't tried smaller areas, but it sounds like he's going to be going bigger than that.

[SaiFightsMS]

I thought about moving this to instructor central but when I thought about all the people who train on a vareity of surfaces but do not teach - I decided to leave it here.

[shotochem]

I train on them. They reduce wear and tear on the ankles and arches of the feet. A lot better than the old cement or tile floor. The only thing is your feet tend to stick to the mat a bit or you may catch a toe where the seems meet.

[kchenault]

Have to second shotochem on this on. Your feet do catch sometimes, but overall the best surface I have trained on. Your feet don't get blisters like they would on carpet. They don't move around except at the seams, and that is negligible.

[SBN Doug]

Can't speak from performance, but similar ones looked pretty expensive last I saw.

 

Considering the spinning we sometimes do, I prefer a carpeted floor with good comercial grade padding underneath. For falling we either pull out the 6x12 folding mats, or some schools have the EXTRA thick "specialty" padding under the carpet. But that's expensive too.

[monkeygirl]

I've gone to tournaments where they had the puzzle mats. They're pretty soft and all that goodness, but they're very squeaky. Maybe that's just because they were brand-new at the facility, I'm not sure.

[kchenault]

Squeaky is as squeaky does. Very squeaky. Hard to slide for stretching as well.

[Kensai]

I think we have ver similiar mats in our dojo. They are pretty good. They dont move to much and they are pretty easy to put together.

[chh]

I have them in my garage, not Century brand but probably about the same thing. They weren't particularly cheap, I covered half of a small 2-car garage and it cost me well over $100. Got em at Home Depot, hopefully Century's are cheaper. They do not seem to slide much although it's hard to tell in that space. I have noticed that although I work out in my garage very seldom the edges are looking pretty worn, and there are various small tears here and there, the stuff is pretty soft. We have a wooden training floor at my dojo, the floor is less than a year old and the surface shows significant wear, I'd imagine puzzle mats would be in complete tatters by now.