1.1 This guide for sports facility padding - describes wall and fixed object padding practices in and around indoor and outdoor overall playing areas for sports and recreation. This guide intends to inform owners, facility operators, and designers/installers of the performance properties and material components of sports padding to be considered when selecting wall and fixed object padding, where other standards from sports-governing bodies or sports associations are not available.
1.2 This guide directs its user to other sources – such as ASTM Standards (Specifications, Test Methods and Practices), that offer numerous testing options to determine the performance properties of the different padding components separately and as a whole at any chosen time in the life-cycle of the product. It identifies other standards organizations, sports-governing bodies, and other sports associations that can offer additional guidance for sports padding.
1.3 This guide does not apply to – horizontal surface padding, such as; wrestling mats (see ASTM F1081), weightlifting and fitness floor mats. This guide is of general interest to all sport activities, but does not specifically apply to special sports equipment padding or extreme sports padding. It does not apply to climbing wall padding, trampoline equipment padding, pole-vault padding, gymnastics, cheerleading padding, skateboarding, roller sports, and bicycling. This guide does not apply to snow sports venues, such as recreational and sport ski and snowboard venues, luge, and skeleton venues. This guide does not apply to amusement rides and adventure venues. Those guidelines for these activity areas may be addressed by other ASTM committees, governing bodies for those sports and sports associations for those particular recreational activities.
1.4 This guide is not a specification – for the properties of the pad itself. Impact attenuation for indoor padding is addressed in ASTM Specification F2440. Head injuries are one of the most serious injuries that can occur during an impact, therefore the ability of a padding system to reduce the likelihood of head injuries is critical; that is its primary purpose. F2440 for indoor padding, allows users to quantify the impact in terms of G-max values and the Head Injury Criterion (HIC) values from specified drop heights (See ASTM F355), and specifies the maximums for impact attenuation. In addition to looking at impact attenuating testing, this guide identifies numerous other material testing standards for other properties and characteristics of indoor and outdoor padding. Look to other standards referred to in this guide for test methods and specifications.
Keywords
PADDING
Rationale
ASTM F2440 is the standard specification for indoor sports padding and offers a specification for impact attenuation of wall padding used in competitive and recreational sports venues. All padding constructions are included. The intended use of F2440 is for the qualification of construction designs and comparison of products, testing wall padding for its impact attenuation properties (maximum HIC and G-max). Unfortunately, F2440 is the lone standard for sports padding. There are many other properties of the padding system and its components that play a significant role in the performance of sports padding. Also, F2440 does not offer any guidance with respect to choosing the appropriate type of padding for a particular application, nor does it offer any guidance to where padding might be used in sports facilities. This Standard Guide is proposed to remedy that and supply the sports facility designer and sports facility operators with overall guidance for sports padding.
