Musings of a Marketing Maven

For seri­ous yoga begin­ners like me, what’s under your hands and feet really mat­ters. I’ve learned that the right mat can make the dif­fer­ence between slip­ping (and falling) and a yoga pose that feels bal­anced and well aligned.

What keeps me from falling?

For my home prac­tice the right mat is a 71-inch mat that’s firm and dense with­out being too cushy.

It pro­vides good cush­ion­ing for poses that are oth­er­wise hard on your knees, elbows or hands. (It’s also 2 inches wider than usual.) For a tall yogini the 26 x 71-inch dimen­sions make a dif­fer­ence if you want to stay within the con­fines of the mat while doing vinyasa sequences.

Like my sis­ters I’m plagued with sweaty hands and feet when work­ing out, so it took sev­eral tries to find the right solu­tion to mat man­age­ment. (Before then I had a few humil­i­at­ing times when my down­ward fac­ing dog pose dis­solved under­neath me, and I did a face plant on the floor.) I learned the hard way that a num­ber of so-called “sticky mats” are just not sticky enough for peo­ple prone to sweaty palms when they exercise…

Here’s the solu­tion that works for me in hot weather or very warm studios:

• a 71-inch mat from Man­duka (the “Black­Mat­PRO model”)
• Plus, a “skid­less” yoga towel from Yog­i­toes on top of the mat (it’s eas­ier to wash the towel than clean the mat)

To clean the mat I use a liq­uid organic soap (from Ver­mont Soap). My cats and I like its smell…

The down­side to my won­der­ful Man­duka mat is that it’s heavy (over 6 pounds) and quite thick when rolled up. It’s imprac­ti­cal for lug­ging back and forth on a reg­u­lar basis between home and the yoga studio.

As a result I bought a “travel wor­thy” mat from Man­duka that is 2 inches nar­rower and 2 pounds lighter than my main mat, but still a lovely 71 inches long. (When I bought mine, the only color was pur­ple but now you have sev­eral choices.)

For travel I’ve exper­i­mented with a shorter and thin­ner rub­ber mat sold by Lul­ule­mon, but it wrin­kles too eas­ily when rolled up in the suit­case (and the wrin­kles don’t eas­ily dis­ap­pear). It’s so light­weight that it pro­vides an unsta­ble foun­da­tion on a hotel car­pet, and thus defeats its main purpose.

And when I really need to pack effi­ciently for extended travel, I just bring the skid­less yoga towel and put it directly on the hotel car­pet. It keeps me from falling, get­ting “rug rash” or pick­ing up who knows what germs from pre­vi­ous vis­i­tors who stayed in that hotel room…

It works for me.

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