The Best Yoga Mats for Pregnancy

The short answer

Buy the JadeYoga Harmony. Of everything a mat can do, the one that changes most during pregnancy is grip, because your center of gravity moves forward and upward and a foot that slides half an inch is no longer a small thing. The Harmony has the stickiest dry surface of any mat on this site, in three lengths, and it grips from the first session with no break-in period to wait out.

If the thing that actually hurts is kneeling, the Manduka PRO is the better buy: 6 mm of dense closed-cell PVC that does not compress to nothing under a knee. If you are already spending most of your practice lying on your side, the Gaiam Essentials Thick has roughly twice the foam and costs a fraction of either.

What actually changes

It is worth being specific, because the mat industry's answer to every question is "thicker" and that is wrong here at least half the time.

Balance changes before the belly does. Relaxin loosens ligaments early, and the weight that shifts your balance arrives gradually and never stops moving. The practical consequence is that a mat which lets a hand or a foot creep is a problem well before it would have been one. This is why grip ranks above cushioning on this page and nowhere else on the site, and it is the whole case for a genuinely grippy surface rather than a soft one.

You spend more time low down. Prenatal sequences move toward hands and knees, side-lying, seated and supported shapes, and away from deep twists, prone poses and long holds on one leg. A surface that is kind to a knee, a forearm and a hip bone matters more each month, and a surface that is kind to the soles of your feet matters less.

Your stance gets wider. Almost every prenatal modification widens the feet — a wider mountain pose, a wider forward fold, a wider child's pose with room for a belly. A standard mat is 24 inches across and that gets tight. Length matters too, because a supported side-lying shape with a bolster uses more mat than a standing pose does. Both are covered properly in the size guide.

Thickness cuts both ways. A very thick foam mat is lovely to lie on and genuinely less stable to stand on, and standing stability is the thing you can least afford to give away. The honest answer is a dense mat in the 5 to 6 mm band plus a small pad for kneeling, rather than a 10 mm mat for everything — the argument is laid out in full in the thickness guide.

One more thing, and it is the quiet one: smell. Nausea is not a minor consideration, and a brand-new natural rubber mat has a strong smell for the first couple of weeks. If you are buying mid-first-trimester, either choose a PVC mat or air the rubber one outside for a week before it comes anywhere near your face. Why mats smell explains which materials do it and for how long.

The five, side by side

Every figure above is the number the maker publishes rather than a measurement of our own. The column that decides it for most people is the third one: on this page grip outranks padding, and padding has a cheap add-on fix while grip does not.

The props that matter more

If you have a reasonable mat already, two props will change your practice more than any mat upgrade will, and together they cost less than one premium mat.

A bolster. Side-lying with a bolster between the knees and another under the ribs is the single most-used prenatal shape, and it is also the one that makes resting positions comfortable rather than something to endure. A rectangular bolster is the right shape because you also sit on it — the bolsters are ranked here and the placements are here.

Two blocks. Blocks under the hands raise the floor, which is what makes a forward fold work again when there is a belly in the way, and a block under a sitting bone tilts the pelvis so seated shapes stop pulling on your lower back. Two, matching, bought at the same time — the reasoning is in how many blocks you need.

A strap is the honorable third, mostly because it lets you reach a foot you can no longer reach. If you are building the whole set from nothing, the beginner kit puts it in order.