Yoga Teacher Training Forum

Why Use A Premium Yoga Mat For Your Practice
By I Inbar

When entering a yoga position, your body has a unique opportunity to let go, while staying fully alert and in a high state of consciousness. This is when Yoga truing is best. The alternative is injury. When you attempt to go into an asana without the right intensity and will, and without the concentration it takes to do it, you will get hurt. If you try and go into a position without the knowledge of the way the body should move, you will hurt yourself. At times, you will feel it right away, by recognizing an intense pain in one or more parts of the body. In other times, you will not even recognize the pain. While you are trying to get into the right form, you might be ignoring the alarm bells your body rings in full volume. This is the most common mistake, and it is done by most of the practitioners in the first years. This is the main reason of back and knee injuries, the type it takes a long time to create and longer to heal.

When doing a wrong yoga posture, you may notice an intense burning sensation, or a feeling that resembles a knife cutting your muscle. This shouldn't happen, yet it is very common. It is the alarm the body sounds when you are tearing muscle or tendon tissue while entering a pose in the wrong way. While this is not too good, it is still better than hurting yourself slowly and without pain, injuries that are in areas of the body that are not that sensible. While hurting a muscle tissue is noticed right away, it is also relatively easy to fix, simply by going to a few sessions of physiotherapy. Sometimes, these type of injuries can be treated simply by adjusting your body to the right way in your posture, and keeping the regular routine. The other type of injuries, which is unfelt in the beginning, is not as easy to fix.

The type of injury you get from chronically practicing the wrong way is usually not muscle oriented, but touches another aspect of our body. Our joints are made out of a mixture of tissues. Muscle, tendons, bones, blood vessels, are only a few of the parts that constructs our joints. These complex parts of the body have cartilage in them. The knee has the meniscus, while the back has the discs to hold the bones and keep them from hitting each other. These parts of the body are very important, yet they carry no nerves. Hurting them is harder than hurting muscles on a daily routine, yet while taking our body into intense asanas, it becomes easy. By stretching our body on the mat, we open areas in the body that are usually not open at all. Getting these areas to open, and them move into a posture on top of that is very dangerous if done wrong, as it exposes those specific hard to heal areas to injuries.

To make sure we are not hurting ourselves we need a combination of things. One of them is knowledge that comes with patience, will, and the right teacher. It is very important to take the time to read and ask about the postures you do. Know the right way they are done, how to get into and out of them. Another aspect of the safe practice in yoga training is using a premium mat. Using high quality equipment in the yoga studio is as important as using it in the gym or on the road or at home. Using the wrong type of gear can create an invitation for injury. In practice it is even more important as getting your skills takes time, but we depend on ourselves. Driving a car is easy to learn, yet you never know who is driving the car next to yours, and they could cause an accident. You need a high quality safe car to keep you safe. In yoga you are not likely to get hit by your fellow yogi that practices next to you, but each part of your body is a different car on the road of your body, a road that starts in your mind and ends up in the studio (where a new road begins).

Safe practice, with intention and high levels of concentration and knowledge are the basic needs for a yogi. Using the right equipment for the job will give your mind the freedom it needs, as it takes away the concentration from worrying and into the practice.

I practice Kung Fu and Yoga, and I am a certified Chinese doctor, massage therapist and a GYM instructor. My knowledge comes from studying, practicing, and my passion. I have seen many people hurt themselves just because they were not guided properly. I write here in order to share my knowledge and hope it helps.

A Hot Little Yoga Mat

By Charlise Cadeau

A Bikram Yoga Mat or a variation of is a must if you are into Bikram yoga or hot yoga of any type. The end result of hot yoga of any kind is a whole lot of perspiration. Did I mention that the perspiration is all over the place? So a regular mat, in these situations, likely will not do unless you don't mind slip sliding around? What needs to be in place is something that will give you traction mixed in with absorption. Enter Bikram yoga mat and Bikram yoga towel.

There are three main options available to solve the dilemma of the sweat and traction together in one. They range from super simple and cheap to just buying a tool exactly for the job, which is a great way to solve things.

Option 1 - use a towel with your regular yoga mat. Well you probably didn't need to read this to know that, but really a towel will work. It will keep all the sweat under control, but when it comes to traction just be careful cause the towel does not give you the traction you need for postures. So you can't practice on it you can just use it alongside your yoga mat.

Option 2 - use a proper Bikram yoga mat towel. These nifty little things are much thinner. They look like micro fiber and they start around $20 and up. You lay it over your mat and voila you can practice on it as well as use it to wick the moistness away.

Option 3 - this is also obvious but some people don't know about it, and that is to buy a mat specifically for Bikram Yoga. These mats are sticky on the bottom and soft yet absorbing on the top! Well now this sounds like what we are looking for! It is the only thing is that they can be hard to come by.

Bikram Yoga mats, although hard to come by are the best option available if you are strictly doing this style of yoga. They are specific to managing sweat and traction in one. They have 3 main qualities to them, not to different from regular yoga but slightly varied. The bottom is sticky so the mat stays put, the main part of the mat is designed for cushioning and then the top layer is most definitely for sweat absorption. These full meal deals can often be washed in the machine and put in the dryer, which is really easy maintenance compared to other yoga mats out there. Pricing you can expect to pay $60 and up for a Bikram yoga mat. Shop around and online is really the best place to start.

There are a few other choices that exist to cover your Bikram yoga needs. There are cotton yoga rugs that are apparently quite good in these types of conditions. And their history substantiates this too given they have been used longer then anything else on the market, and in places like India and abroad. The cotton yoga mats are woven. They give good cushioning combined with good traction. Once there is a bit of moisture your hands and feet will adhere really well. The other mat that may work well for you is the Lululemon Hot Yogi Mat. This mat, although not specific to Bikram yoga, would work well. It is priced really well at $35 for all the great qualities that it has to offer.

The perfect mat for you is out there. You will be well served by looking online and speaking with other Bikram yoga students to get some additional input on what works best for them. There are a plethora of options to choose from so if you hit any roadblocks it may be from having to many choices at hand. In the end all that matters is that you find something you are happy with that will work well for you.

Charlise Cadeau is a free lance writer, yoga instructor and world traveler.