As a private coach, if there’s one piece of apparatus I like to recommend my shoppers have available throughout class, it’s an excellent yoga mat. The best yoga mats could make your exercise or yoga follow extra snug and safer on your joints, boosting your enjoyment of motion, which carries too many physical and emotional benefits to record and thus growing the chance you’ll decide to the behavior persistently.

Naturally, you would possibly need to lean on one of the well-liked yoga mats with religious followings that can assist you attain your objectives. Each the Lululemon Reversible and the Alo Warrior mat present ample cushioning, anti-odor and moisture-wicking properties, and loads of room to discover your physique — however additionally they supply starkly totally different exercise experiences. Let’s break down which yoga mat is finest for you.

Measurement and weight

In relation to yoga mats, dimension issues. You need to ideally give your self round 7 to 10 inches of leeway so your head and limbs keep off the bottom throughout your follow.

Measuring a bit over six toes, the usual Alo Warrior Mat has loads of area for these with longer limbs. The usual Lululemon Reversible Mat measures shorter at 5 toes 11 inches lengthy, so it doesn’t have fairly as a lot room to maneuver. Each the Lululemon and Alo mats can be found in 7 foot lengthy variations for taller folks, nevertheless, so when you’re significantly loyal to at least one model, you’re sure to seek out your excellent match inside it. And Each mats measure 26.4 inches or 2 toes, 2.4 inches vast, simply the correct quantity of room to help you transfer horizontally within the frontal airplane when stepping out at hip width.

Each the Alo and Lululemon mats measure 5 millimeters thick, simple sufficient to roll up when not in use whereas nonetheless offering sufficient snug padding between your physique and the bottom. However the Alo’s foam is lots denser — it’s 35% heavier than the Lululemon mat but solely 4.6% longer, weighing in at 8 kilos in the usual dimension, whereas the Lululemon mat measures simply 5.24 kilos. This implies the Lululemon is lots simpler to hold round city to and from the yoga studio, whereas the Alo can actually tire you out even earlier than you make it to your class.

The denser, heavier foam can also be grippier, which suggests the Alo stays put as an alternative of sliding round, a profit when you plan to make use of your mat for plyometric cardio-centric actions, like mountain climbers or lateral skater hops. On the draw back, the Alo’s dense rubber additionally prevented it from mendacity flat, no matter whether or not we laid it down on its polyurethane or rubber aspect. Even when we rolled it out flat for hours beforehand, or if we pinned it down with a water bottle, we couldn’t get it to lie flat on the edges, which means we successfully misplaced a number of treasured inches on what’s speculated to be the longer, roomier mat.

Grip, sweat resistance and moisture wicking

Each the Lululemon and Alo mats are reversible, which means you get to decide on between a slicker polyurethane prime layer or a cushioned rubber layer very best for sweatier classes.

The Alo’s polyurethane layer seems to be matte, however it’s nonetheless tangibly slick and clean. Whereas it provides loads of assist throughout static poses like downward canine when your physique has 4 factors of contact with the bottom, it feels a bit of too slippery to function assist throughout steadiness poses like dancer or chicken of paradise. Superior yogis would possibly respect the graceful, agency floor, since it may possibly make it easier to root your toes and toes extra firmly into the bottom, whereas a grippier, softer layer would possibly throw off your steadiness.

Each mats declare to be moisture-wicking, however I discovered that each depart one thing to be desired — if I take advantage of both with the graceful polyurethane aspect dealing with up, they really feel almost equivalent in that after just a few beads of sweat, I’ll go sliding proper off the mat. In neither case would I like to recommend the graceful aspect for high-intensity exercises. (When you do use it this manner, preserve a microfiber towel available to soak up additional moisture whereas offering a bit of additional traction.)

However utilizing their extra cushioned sides, there’s a transparent distinction. I’ve been utilizing the Lululemon Reversible mat for the final seven years, and whereas my cats have adopted it as a (very costly) scratching publish, it’s roughly retained its cushion and grip all these years. Although my exercises yield a ton of sweat, the rubber aspect of the Lululemon mat has by no means stayed damp all through the length of a high-intensity exercise within the a number of years I’ve used it. Publish-workout sweat stains have been barely discernible, and it additionally felt dryer to the contact all through everything of the exercise.

The heavier, denser Alo mat retained extra moisture and took longer to dry. Whereas we’d have to make use of the mat over years to actually know by some means, it makes us marvel about long run harm and an total shorter lifespan.

You’ll need to abide by sure tips when taking good care of your yoga mat: keep away from harsh cleansing options, preserve weights and exercise gear off the mat, take away any jewellery earlier than your follow in order to not scuff the mat, and retailer it withstand shield the rubbery underside from any jagged edges.

When you’re on the lookout for a set-it-and-forget-it possibility, you may’t go unsuitable with the Lululemon mat. The model suggests wiping it down after use with a pure cleanser and damp material.

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The Alo mat requires making use of a 1:20 resolution of oil-free cleaning soap or vinegar and heat water to a microfiber material — they warning towards making use of the answer on to the mat — after which wiping down the mat. Whereas that is hardly a very concerned cleansing course of à la a 12-step nighttime skincare routine, it does counsel that the mat is extra delicate than the Lululemon. And certainly, once I first obtained it, I seen scuff marks on the graceful aspect even earlier than use. I can’t think about how beat up it’ll take care of years of follow.

I adhered to those cleansing options on each mats and located the grippy polyurethane sides wiped down easily instantly. The rubber sides have been trickier, since they each attracted dust like chalk on a college blackboard. Provided that Alo’s black rubber underside is so grippy, it attracts additional mud and dust, so I wanted to manually choose off the particles to get it actually clear. I didn’t must poke and prod on the Lululemon rubber aspect as a lot, possible as a result of the intense pink coloration disguised a number of it.

Yoga tradition is all about shiny and daring hues and patterns — Lululemon clearly takes the cake on this one, with 17 colorways to select from versus seven for Alo (together with three tie-dye patterns, that are extra attention-grabbing to take a look at than their monochromatic counterparts). Whereas the sheer quantity of colorways and patterns out there for the Lululemon mat would possibly encourage a way of choice fatigue for some, it actually provides an opportunity for practitioners to showcase their private model (and possibly even match it to their outfit). The colorways are without delay distinctive sufficient to really feel just like the mat was designed for you, but distinctive sufficient to scream Lululemon in one of the simplest ways potential.

I chosen a pink-ish tone for each mats so I might make an apples-to-apples comparability. Whereas darkish finishes cover sweat higher (it might have made my life that a lot simpler to pick the black possibility in each, and when you’re actually involved about such issues, a darkish coloration is an effective alternative), I wished to see clearly how they’d fare towards dripping sweat.

My fingers have been barely damp throughout my follow, and that instantly created an embarrassingly darkish imprint on the “Smoky Quartz” (a light-weight dusty pink) Alo mat. The brighter pink on the Lululemon mat higher hid the moisture, as I solely detected faint strains of sweat all through my follow. Fortunately, the rubber underside of the Alo mat is black, so you may at all times alternate between displaying off your character (and coloration desire), after which promptly retreating to a kind of hibernation mode when you flip it over to the rubbery black aspect.

Whereas these are each high quality yoga mats, the Lululemon is inexpensive, gives higher worth for cash, extra colorway choices, higher moisture administration, and lighter weight — which means an all-around extra pleasant yoga expertise that’ll truly make you look ahead to hitting the mat. It’s only a higher mat at a lower cost, no matter utility.

The Alo is a bit grippier and would possibly keep in place higher when you’re targeted on high-intensity routines, so it’s an inexpensive alternative for holding at your house studio. However we’d nonetheless give the nod to the Lululemon right here, for the reason that Alo’s denser foam building makes it each tougher to maintain it flat and a bit extra cussed to roll up in a compact, stowable silhouette if you could stow it away.

By the way in which, when you just like the Alo look, I’d go for the Alo Air Mat, a 3.5-pound model of the Warrior mat that’s simply 2 millimeters thick and equally non-slip. Likewise, when you’re on the lookout for final portability, If the 5 kilos Lululemon Reversible mat nonetheless seems like an excessive amount of, I’d go for its 2.3-pound cousin in The (Un)Mat.