Your core is the centerpiece for any muscular physique. If your goal is to lose weight, tone up or build muscle, then a strong core is THE building block for your fitness achievements.

This core exercise mat has been carefully designed to fully extend the spine during the horizontal phase of a sit up. The curved shape encourages slow, controlled movements to ensure your abdominal muscle group is fully engaged.

The products on the market at the time of developing this Abmat was very low technology, a simple piece of furniture foam encased in a stitched PVC bag, so this was a real opportunity to design a product which could be easily maintained and offer maximum longevity when used in a gym environment.

To date we have manufactured over 125,000 ABmats and these are shipped all over the world from our factory in the Lake District.

The challenges

The forecast of numbers for the first 12months was 20,000pieces, the ABmat is a large product which requires multiples of big square moulds, and this would make them very heavy for manually operating and would also take up too much room on our existing production lines. Considerations such as, how to keep the moulds warm while the material cured and how to make the moulds hardwearing for consistent use all had to be calculated.

The solution

We decided the best approach was to build a new production line. We knew this line would carry at least 3 different product ranges so we invested in a new self-contained unit (appx 2500sqft) within the factory and began to build a large carousel. Mould carriers had to be designed and built to make it easier for the operators to open and close and we built all the post-production processes within the same area to maintain lean manufacturing practices.

Material selection was relatively straight forward, it needed to be firm and hardwearing for regular use and also non-slip, we selected a flexible foam system.