Once you've donned a comfortable yoga outfit and your feet are bare and, you need one final indispensable piece of equipment for your practice. A sticky yoga mat completes the picture, as yoga instructor Kathy Lee Kappmeier notes in "Instructing Hatha Yoga." A mat gives you a stable, nonslip surface and cushioning for your knees, elbows, spine and sitbones as you move through the postures. You can borrow the provided mats at your health club or invest $15 to $100 in one that matches your personal preferences.
Traction
If your fitness club provides short, padded mats for general floor-exercise work, you definitely want to start bringing a yoga-specific mat, Kappmeier advises. Floor-exercise mats can slide across the floor, forcing you to pay more attention to the wandering mat than your practice, which creates distraction and the potential for injury. A towel or no mat is safer in fact, as floor mats have too much cushion to provide stability during standing and balancing poses. Yoga mats offer traction on the floor via an inherent stickiness to the material and a firm handhold during inverted poses.
Cushioning
Yoga mats, like Goldilock's porridge, "shouldn't be too thick or too thin," writes Sherri Baptiste, part of a family of yoga fitness pioneers, in "Yoga With Weights for Dummies." Mats range from a fraction of an inch to a full inch, she observe; you want relief from the hard studio floor that isn't so spongy that you don't have a solid base. She recommends a thickness of a quarter- to a half-inch thick. Lighter travel mats come in thicknesses of 1/8 inch. If you are particularly uncomfortable sitting or kneeling on the floor, tend toward a thicker mat. Look for a mat as tall as you are plus 6 inches, so that if you are 5 feet, 6 inches tall, you need to purchase a 6-foot yoga mat.
Materials
Baptiste recommends avoiding foam mats, which are made for aerobics exercising. Typical "sticky" yoga mats are often made of PVC, which raises questions of negative environmental impact given harmful byproducts of PVC manufacture, writes Cynthia Morris in "Yoga Journal." More natural alternatives include rubber, dried grass backed with latex, hemp and canvas. For some people, buying a mat of biodegradable material is a priority, writes yoga therapist Zack Kurland in "Morning Yoga Workouts," while for others, price, color or comfort will be the top criteria.
Manufacturers
The popularity of yoga has led "every Tom, Dick and Harriet" to jump into the yoga-mat business, Baptiste writes, with the result being mats that break down quickly and get slippery from sweat. She recommends Airex, Tapas and Prana mats, widely available as of 2011, as reputable brands. For mats made of alternative materials, Morris recommends products by online purveyors Jade Yoga, based in Pennsylvania; Health & Yoga, based in Virginia; and Scotland-based EcoYoga.
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