The Best Men's Yoga and Pilates Clothes

The short answer

Fitted or lined on the bottom, fitted or tucked on top. Everything that goes wrong in a man's first yoga class goes wrong because the clothes move when the body turns over, and every fix is a version of choosing something that stays put.

In practice that means one of three things below the waist: a linerless short with your own underlayer, a short with a compression liner sewn in, or tights. Above the waist it means a top that either fits closely or is short enough to stay tucked. That is genuinely the whole brief, and anything that satisfies it works — including clothes you already own.

A note on why this page exists at all. Every other clothing page on this site is written around women's sizing and women's cuts, which leaves a man reading about squat-proof leggings and getting nothing useful. The underlying principles are the same; the garments are not.

What fails, and why

Four specific failures, in roughly the order men encounter them:

• Loose gym shorts with a wide leg opening. In any seated straddle, wide-legged forward fold or reclined twist, a loose leg opening stops covering anything. This is the single most common problem and it is the reason liners exist.
• A long loose tee. In a downward dog it slides down your chest and over your face. In a shoulderstand it goes further than that. Tucking in helps; a shorter or closer-fitting top helps more.
• Basketball shorts with a long inseam. Too much fabric to get out of the way in a deep lunge, and the hem catches your knee on the mat.
• Cotton, in a warm room. Cotton holds sweat and stays wet, which is fine for a slow class and miserable in a heated one. Synthetics wick and dry; the trade is that they feel clammy before you warm up.

Worth noticing what is NOT a failure: price, brand, and whether the garment is marketed for yoga at all. A plain synthetic tee and a pair of lined running shorts satisfy the whole brief. Most of the men's activewear market is running and training gear, and most of it is fine here.

Shorts, tights or loose pants

Read the table as two questions. Is the room hot? If yes, you want one thin layer, which argues for linerless shorts or tights. Will you be upside down? If yes, you want nothing loose, which argues for tights or a lined short and rules out the cotton pant.

The tights row deserves honesty rather than enthusiasm. Fitted tights are objectively the best-performing garment in this category and plenty of men will not wear them alone in a room full of strangers. Worn under a pair of shorts they solve the coverage problem completely and the self-consciousness problem as well, and that combination — tights plus a linerless short over the top — is the setup most experienced male practitioners end up with.

On inseam: 5 to 7 inches is the useful range for shorts. Shorter than 5 and coverage depends entirely on the liner; longer than about 9 and the fabric starts catching your knee in lunges. The roundup we read while putting this together makes the same point about the 5 to 10 inch range, and it is the one specification on a shorts listing worth checking before you buy.

The top is the harder problem

Bottoms have an obvious answer and tops do not, because the thing that makes a top comfortable — a loose, airy cut — is exactly the thing that makes it slide over your head when you invert. There are three workable approaches and no perfect one.

A fitted or compression top does not move at all. It is the honest best answer and it is also the one that asks most of your self-consciousness, for the same reason tights do. A regular-fit tee, tucked in is the compromise most men settle on: it behaves well enough, and an untucked hem is a problem only in a handful of poses. No top at all is common in hot classes, perfectly normal, and a studio-specific question rather than a gear one.

Whatever cut you pick, the fabric decision is the same as for bottoms: synthetic for anything warm, cotton for anything slow. The fabric argument in cotton versus synthetic applies to men's clothing without modification — it is about fiber behavior, not sizing.

Pilates asks for something different

If the class is pilates rather than yoga, two things change. The instructor needs to see the line of your body to correct it, which is why pilates rooms skew toward fitted clothing far more than yoga rooms do. And on a reformer, loose fabric is a practical hazard: a wide hem catches in the carriage and the springs.

So for pilates the order flips — tights or fitted shorts first, loose pants last. The other half of a pilates dress code is footwear, and most studios require grip socks rather than suggesting them; the picks in the grip sock roundup include men's sizes, and whether you need them covers the studio rules.

For the full picture on either side, what to wear for pilates and what to wear to your first class both apply to men as written, since both are about behavior under movement rather than cut.