The Best Yoga Mat Bags and Carriers

The short answer

Buy the Manduka Commuter Mat Carrier. It is a cotton sling with a padded section where the webbing crosses your shoulder, and cinch loops that tighten as the mat hangs instead of a buckle you have to thread. On a dense 6 mm mat and a twenty-minute walk, that padding is the whole difference between a carrier you use and one that lives in a cupboard.

If you only ever carry a mat from the car to a studio door, the Gaiam Easy-Cinch sling does that for the least money and weighs nothing. If your mat comes off the floor of a heated room and goes straight into a bag, buy the Manduka Breathe Easy instead: it is mesh, so the mat is enclosed without being sealed in. All three are listed in full below.

A strap or a bag?

There are only three questions, and they are worth answering honestly before looking at products, because the answers point at completely different things.

Does the mat need to be covered? A strap leaves the mat exposed to rain, road spray and the floor of a bus. For a five-minute walk in dry weather that is irrelevant. For a daily commute on public transit, it is the reason people switch to a bag — and the reason a mat gets grubby enough to need a proper clean every week.

Do you need somewhere to put things? Keys, a phone, a water bottle and a towel add up to a second bag if your carrier has no pockets. A sling has none, by design. If you want one object to leave the house with, you want a bag with a pocket, and you will pay for it in bulk.

How heavy is the mat? This is the question people skip. A dense 6 mm mat is a genuinely heavy object, and a bare nylon strap concentrates that weight on one narrow line across your shoulder. Padding, or a wide cotton webbing, is what makes a heavy mat portable. A light travel mat does not need any of it — the travel mat roundup covers the mats that fold into a suitcase instead.

Will your mat actually fit?

More carriers are returned over fit than over quality, and the specification that catches people is width rather than length.

A standard mat is 24 inches wide. A Manduka PRO is 26 inches wide. Most mat bags are cut for the standard figure — the Breathe Easy, for instance, is listed as fitting mats 24 inches wide or narrower, which rules out a PRO. A wider mat rolls to a fatter cylinder, and two inches of extra width is enough that the zipper will not close.

Thickness compounds it. A 6 mm mat rolls thicker than a 4 mm mat of the same width, and a 10 mm foam mat is thicker again. Slings handle this without complaint because they cinch to whatever is there; bags do not. Check the rolled diameter of your mat against the bag's stated dimensions before ordering, and read the thickness guide if you are buying the mat and the bag at the same time.

Length is the easy one. A 68-inch mat fits anything sold as a mat bag; a 79 or 85 inch mat needs the extra large version, and there are fewer of those. The size guide lists which mats come in those lengths.

The three, side by side

Note what none of the three has: a pocket. That is deliberate. Carriers with cargo pockets exist, and they add enough bulk that most people end up carrying a normal bag as well — so the honest recommendation is to pick the carrier on fit and comfort and keep using the bag you already own for your keys.

The damp-mat problem

Here is the failure mode nobody warns you about. You finish a hot class, roll the mat while it is still wet, zip it into a closed bag and leave it in a car until tomorrow. That is how a mat starts to smell, and once a mat smells, it mostly stays that way.

Three things fix it. Wipe the mat down before rolling, which takes ten seconds — see the mat cleaner roundup for what to use on your particular surface. Use a towel on top during practice so most of the sweat ends up in something you can put through a wash, which the towel roundup covers. And carry the mat in something that breathes — a mesh bag or an open sling — rather than a sealed tube.

If the mat already smells, the carrier is not the culprit and a new bag will not help. Why does my yoga mat smell works through what is recoverable and what is not.