Yoga Mats

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The rise and development of yoga in the United States is a traceable effort. As of 2008, the American yoga industry sells $5.7 billion worth of goods and services, an 87 percent rise in four years. Yoga Journal has a million plus readership that places it in the highest echelons of niche competition magazines. All the popularity has caused quite a stir, but the focus is still on the gentle and calm. Yoga mats still provide the foundation for the art, meditation, and practice. Their functional role as well as a few different formats will be mapped in this article.

Yoga mats are the physical basis for practicing yoga. Within the studio or the home, the map allows you to keep contact with the ground in a gripping way for an art that is usually barefoot. Depending on the mat, there may be different sides. For instance, in regular yoga practices the bottom of the mat will have a sticky plastic surface that attaches well to hardwood, tile and other smooth surfaces. The opposing side with have a fur- or rug-like feel for the bottom of your feet. Traction is necessary on both sides, but because of the difference surfaces, the materials are at times quite different. The front is for foot traction while the bottom is for surface traction.

However, that is not the only configuration. Depending on the material used in the production process, yoga mats are of varying eco-friendliness or biodegradability. Your standard yoga mat will be a plastic polyvinyl chloride composite. Because of the concerns over the materials in PVC mats, there was been a large movement to replace them with more eco-friendly versions. The most common eco mat uses natural rubber and jute. Jute is second in world production of textiles to cotton, but surpasses even cotton in Southeast Asia where it is predominant. Yoga mats made from these materials are natural in composition, sticky for great traction on hard surfaces because of the rubber, but still have some texture for your feet because of the coarser fibrous jute. If you are still looking for the synthesized grip of a rubber mat, there are other thermo plastic polymers out there which are used to create mats. Generally mats come in either on material or two faces that are meant for either your feet/hands or the floor.

Yoga mats are sometimes produces with a factory layer of film that covers them and makes them less sticky that is desired. This can be removed in a couple ways. Simply leaving the mat in the sun for a day can breakdown the film and contribute to breaking-in the mat. Otherwise a wet rag can be used to wipe off the majority of the layer. Generally all mats will have a break-in time where they will not be as comfortable as they will be with time. This is analogous to breaking in a shoe, and takes roughly the same time as a good hiking boot. Some mats will not have this film because they are made with neither rubber nor any thermo plastic polymers, these are sometimes called rugs and should be carefully differentiated from general mats.

Lastly, most yoga mats come in solid colors. For PVC and other thermoplastics the colors are as endless as the dies in a store, because coloring is added in the early production stages when the composite is still liquid. For eco-friendly mats the colors are more restricted to naturally occurring colors. Typically burnt reds and oranges, deep purples, tan, grey, black, and a natural or woody-looking color formats are available. Some brands pride themselves on certain finishes, and black is used as a branding mechanism for some yoga mats. The colors are fairly flexible, but restricted to the type or composition of the materials used.

Depending on your feet preferences, a softer mat may be in order. For a hot yoga session like in Bikram yoga, it is more critical to have a rug finish in order to retain tension during heavy sweating periods. The options are vast and growing with the popularity of the practice, but this article mapped the most common criteria for deciding which is best.

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