When it comes time to purchase floor mats, there are several things to consider. Not all mats are created equal and it’s important to think about what the mats will be used for before purchasing.
Who will be using the mats and how?
Mats make use of a few different materials to do their duty of cushioning falls. Ethylene-vinyl acetate, or EVA, is a dense substance that can deflect even hard hits from close vicinity. You might be familiar with this material from swim noodles or other foam floating devices. EVA can provide its high impact resistance thanks to its structure of closely packed, closed cells. Just like the name foam suggests, it’s a lot of closed plastic bubbles pressed together, side by side. Since they’re closed, when they get hit, the cells can’t collapse, they just stretch and deform, spreading the energy from an impact over a much greater distance as each cell pushes and pulls on all the others around it.
This “hardness”, or maybe better to think of it as softness in this case, is measured with a system called shore c hardness. A standardized tool is used to press a pointed instrument into a material for a specific time and then the resulting indent is measured to see how the material redistributes energy. Foams with smaller, denser bubbles have a higher shore c hardness, which means that they can absorb harder impacts, but it also means that they’re harder. An easier rating to understand for martial arts mats is kg/cm2 This is how many kilos it takes to compress one square centimeter all the way to the floor. Higher numbers mean it takes a heavier weight, or a harder hit to compress them.
