Choosing a yoga mat

Choosing a yoga mat is a genuinely small decision that the market has made to look large. There are two honest pieces of advice, and they come before any specification.

First: do not buy one before your third class. A folded blanket, a cotton dhurrie or a bedsheet folded four times does everything a mat does for a fortnight on a hard floor, and on carpet you often need nothing at all. Halls keep spare mats. Buy once you know you are staying, and buy knowing what your practice is actually like.

Second: nothing on this page is an affiliate link and no brand is recommended. I have no arrangement with any manufacturer and I am not going to acquire one. What follows is what the specifications mean and what they cost in rupees, so that you can walk into any shop or open any site and decide for yourself.

Prices below are the bands I see in Indian shops and online listings in 2026 and they move. Treat them as orientation, not as quotations.

Before any specification, the two questions that decide everything: what do you actually do on it, and how big are you. This table answers both, with the trade off you are accepting written into the third column, because a recommendation without a downside is an advertisement.

And by body, which nobody puts in a table. Under 170 cm tall: the standard 173 cm mat is fine. 170 to 180 cm: 173 cm works but your heels will be near the edge in the final rest, so 183 cm is worth the extra 300 to 600 rupees. Over 180 cm: buy 183 cm or 200 cm, and stop apologising for it. Broad through the shoulders, or you practise wide legged postures at an angle: a 68 cm or 80 cm width instead of 61 cm, accepting the weight. Heavier build: avoid soft foam, which compresses under a knee and then offers nothing, and choose a firm 6 mm.

Mats sell in roughly four thicknesses and they are genuinely different tools.

The reason 6 mm is the answer for most Indian practitioners is the floor. Vitrified tile and polished granite are hard and cold in a way that a wooden studio floor in a Western article is not, and the advice in those articles is written for the wooden floor. On tile, less than 5 mm punishes the knees and the spine in supine work. This is also why the thickness question barely arises in a class of held postures such as hatha yoga, where you are on the floor for a smaller share of the hour than in a restorative session.

If you take one recommendation, take 6 mm. It is the compromise that fails least often in a practice that includes both standing and floor work. Go to 8 mm only if your knees genuinely hurt on 6, and accept that your balance postures become harder. Go to 4 mm if your practice is mostly standing and flowing and you want the ground under you.

One warning about the thick mats sold for exercise generally, the 10 or 12 mm foam ones. They are excellent for lying down and actively bad for yoga. Every standing posture becomes a balance challenge that has nothing to do with your body. The one exception is a mat kept purely for yoga nidra and lying relaxation, where thickness is all upside and balance never arises.

The standard mat sold in India is about 173 cm long and 61 cm wide. That is the size almost everything on a shelf will be, and for a person up to about 170 cm tall it is fine.

Here is the test that matters, and it is the one nobody does in the shop. Lie down on the mat with your arms by your sides. Your head and your heels should both be on it. If your heels hang off, then every time you lie in savasana your feet are on the floor, and every time you come down from a standing forward bend your hands land on the tiles. Most men over 175 cm need a longer mat, 183 cm or 200 cm, and are never told.

Width matters less until it does. At 61 cm, if you take a wide legged posture at an angle across the mat, one foot is off it. A 68 cm or 80 cm wide mat solves this and is heavier and harder to carry. For a home mat that lives rolled in a corner, wider is a real improvement. For a mat you carry to a hall on a scooter, it is not.

Weight is worth thinking about for exactly this reason. A 6 mm natural rubber mat can weigh 2.5 kilos or more, and if you are carrying it to class and back four times a week, you will notice within a month. A TPE mat of the same size is often under 1.5 kilos.

The material question really reduces to one thing: how much do you sweat, and on what floor. If you practise on smooth vitrified tiles in Chennai in May, buy rubber or cork and stop reading. If you practise on a cool floor in Bangalore in a gentle, slowly paced class, a TPE mat at around 1,000 rupees will serve you for years and there is no argument for spending more.

A word for the cotton mat, which the imported market has quietly written out of the story. A cotton dhurrie over a hard floor is what most of this country practised on, it washes, it does not smell, it costs a fraction of a rubber mat and it is cooler to lie on. Its one flaw is that it slides on polished tiles. Lay it over a cheap PVC mat and you have the best of both at under 1,000 rupees total.

Every roundup mentions the smell of a new mat in passing and none of them says what it is, which is a strange gap in a page that is meant to be helping somebody spend money. So here it is, without either scaremongering or reassurance.

The smell from a new PVC mat is off gassing: volatile compounds and plasticisers leaving a soft plastic. PVC is rigid on its own and is made flexible with plasticisers, historically phthalates, which is why a soft PVC mat smells and a rigid PVC pipe does not. A systematic review and meta analysis of phthalate exposure from PVC products found associations in children between PVC surface materials in the home and the risk of asthma, with a pooled odds ratio of 1.55, and of allergic rhinitis, at 1.32. The authors were careful about the limits of that evidence, and so am I: those studies are about flooring and wall coverings in a house, not about a yoga mat unrolled for twenty minutes a day, and no trial has ever looked at mats.

What that supports is a proportionate conclusion rather than a frightening one. A PVC mat is not a hazard you need to worry about. It is the cheapest mat, it lasts the longest, and hundreds of millions of people have practised on one. But if the smell bothers you, or a child is going to be lying on it, or somebody in the house is asthmatic, the alternatives cost very little more: TPE has no strong smell, and natural rubber has a strong one that is latex rather than plasticiser and fades in a fortnight.

What to do about the smell of any new mat. Unroll it and leave it in a shaded, ventilated place for two or three days before first use, wipe it once with a cloth and a very little mild soap, and do not do what people do, which is leave it in the sun to air. Sun is what kills mats in this country. A shaded balcony for two days removes most of it, and the rest goes within a fortnight of use.

The one genuinely unpleasant category is the very cheap unbranded foam mat sold in a market for two hundred rupees, which sometimes smells strongly for months. That is the only mat I would actively tell somebody to return.

Grip is the specification that actually causes injuries and the one you cannot judge from a listing. Two tests, both of which you can do in a shop:

1. Dry palm push. Put both hands on the mat, shoulder distance apart, and push forward hard as if entering downward dog. Does the surface stay under your hands, or does the skin slide over it?
2. Damp finger test. Wet a fingertip, press it down, drag it. A mat that goes slippery when damp will betray you fifteen minutes into a class in April.

The mistake behind most slipping, though, is not the mat. It is a new mat with a factory coating still on it, and it affects almost every rubber and TPE mat sold. A new mat is slippery for the first two to three weeks. The fix is to wipe it down with a cloth and a little salt water on the first day, then use it. People return perfectly good mats in week one for this reason.

If a mat still slips after that, use a cotton towel across the top third of it where the hands go. That is not a defeat, it is what a great many long term practitioners do anyway.

A mat that is looked after lasts three or four times as long as one that is not, and the care is almost nothing.

• Wipe after each practice with a damp cloth. Sweat is what degrades the surface.
• Wash properly once a month: a bucket of water, a very small quantity of mild soap, a soft cloth, then rinse and hang over a line in the shade. Not in the sun: direct sun cracks rubber and hardens PVC. That is the single most common way a good mat is killed in India.
• Never put a rubber or TPE mat in a washing machine.
• Roll, do not fold. Fold lines become permanent creases and the crease becomes a trip point.
• Roll it with the top surface facing outward so that it lies flat rather than curling up at the corners when you unroll it.
• Store it standing in a corner, not under something heavy.

Replace a mat when it stops gripping after a wash, when the surface pits so much that your hands feel the texture, or when the edges curl permanently. That is usually two years for foam, three to four for TPE, and considerably longer for rubber and cork.

If you want the answer without the reasoning, here it is by situation. No brands, because I do not endorse any.

• Absolute beginner, unsure you will continue: nothing. A folded blanket. Then a 6 mm PVC or TPE mat at 500 to 1,000 rupees after a month.
• Home practice, Bangalore or a cool floor, gentle to moderate practice: 6 mm TPE, 173 cm, around 1,000 to 1,500 rupees. This covers most people reading this.
• Taller than 175 cm: the same, in 183 cm or longer, which usually adds 300 to 600 rupees.
• You sweat a lot, or a hot climate, or a flowing practice: natural rubber or cork over rubber, 4 to 5 mm, 2,000 to 4,000 rupees. This is the one case where spending more genuinely buys safety.
• Sensitive or replaced knees: 8 mm, and accept the wobble in balances, or keep a 6 mm mat and fold a blanket under the knees when you kneel. The second is better and cheaper.
• A cranky lower back: firm rather than soft, because a compressing surface lets the pelvis sag in supine work and that is precisely what you are trying to avoid. Read yoga for back pain before spending anything, since the sequence matters far more than the mat.
• Any intention of inversions later: firm and thin at the point the head goes down. Nobody should be attempting sirsasana unsupervised, and when it is taught, a folded blanket on a firm mat is the arrangement, never a soft one.
• Mostly seated practice, breathing and meditation: a cotton dhurrie or a traditional mat. Nothing thicker is needed and a firm seat is better for the spine. Practise anulom vilom on the floor, not on foam.
• Carrying it to class: weight matters more than you think. Under 1.5 kilos, which means TPE rather than rubber.

Above about 2,500 rupees you are buying durability, ecological credentials and grip in sweat, and nothing else. There is no mat that makes a posture easier. There is only a mat that stops interrupting you, and a 6 mm TPE mat at a thousand rupees achieves that for most of the people I teach.

Specifications mean very little until you know which poses are going to test them. Four situations decide whether a mat is any good, and they map onto four poses.

• Grip under a sweating hand. Adho Mukha Svanasana is where a cheap mat fails, because the hands slide forward and you spend the pose stopping yourself.
• Padding under a bone. Vajrasana and Balasana put the kneecap and the top of the foot straight onto the floor. This is what thickness is for, and a folded blanket beats an expensive mat every time.
• Length. Savasana is the only pose where you are laid out at full height, and it is the one people forget when they buy something short.
• Stability underfoot. Vrikshasana and Trikonasana on a mat that is too soft feel worse than the same poses on a bare floor.

A thick mat is the wrong answer to a knee problem and a folded blanket is the right one, which is the same argument how to start yoga at home makes about props generally. What to wear on it is a separate question, covered in what to wear to a yoga class.

Two things people spend money on that do not help. A very thick mat does not solve a knee problem: it makes Vrikshasana and Tadasana less stable and leaves the knee no better off than a folded blanket would. And an expensive grip surface will not fix hands that slide in Adho Mukha Svanasana if the real cause is that the shoulders are in front of the wrists, which is a correction rather than a purchase. The same money spent on one bolster changes Balasana and Setu Bandhasana completely. If you are practising at home for the first time, the ten minute morning routine tells you what the mat has to survive, and a class will tell you whether the slipping was ever the mat's fault.

This whole page has been about spending money, so it should end with the case for not spending any, which is stronger than the market would like.

Mats are kept in the hall. They are used, they are cleaned, and they are perfectly adequate for the practice a beginner is doing. Blankets are there for the knees and for the folded height under a stiff hip, and a wall is there, which is the most useful prop in the room and the only one nobody sells. Nothing needs to be carried in and nothing needs to be bought before a first class, which means the equipment question can be postponed until it is a real question, asked by somebody who now knows how much they sweat and how long their own body is.

If you would rather bring your own, bring the towel to lay over the top of it and that is enough. A great many long standing students in that hall practise on a cotton dhurrie they have had for years, and it is the arrangement the whole country used before any of this was for sale.

Buy a mat after your third class, when the decision has some evidence behind it. Until then, the sensible order is: come and practise, find out what your practice is actually like, and let the purchase be the last step rather than the first. The classes page has the timings for the hall in north Bangalore and the online batches, and the spare mats mean the only thing you have to arrive with is yourself.