The Best Yoga Towels

The short answer

Buy the Manduka Yogitoes. It is the towel that solves the problem a towel is meant to solve: the silicone nubs on the underside grab the mat so the towel does not creep forward every time you step back to plank, and the top surface grips harder as it gets wetter rather than turning into a slip hazard. It is the most expensive of the three, and it is the one you stop thinking about.

If you want the lightest thing that works, the Manduka eQua mat towel is the same microfiber in a thinner, nub-free sheet that packs smaller — it simply needs your palms to be damp before it holds. If you are deciding whether a towel helps you at all, the Gaiam Grippy is the smallest outlay that still stays put. All three are listed in full below.

A towel, or a different mat?

This is the decision worth making before you spend anything, because a towel is a surface and not a cure. Work out which of these three situations you are actually in.

You sweat, and the mat is fine. This is the case a towel was invented for. A closed-cell mat — most PVC and TPE mats — cannot absorb anything, so sweat sits on top of it and your hands hydroplane. No amount of wiping fixes that mid-practice. An absorbent top layer does, and it is the cheapest intervention available.

The mat is slick when it is dry. A towel is the wrong purchase here. A brand new dense mat has a factory finish that needs wearing in, and that is a matter of weeks of use rather than money — breaking it in is the fix. The slippery-mat page walks through the other causes, most of which are not solved by covering the mat.

The mat is worn out. If the surface is shiny where your hands and feet go, the texture that gave you grip has gone and it does not come back. A towel will get you through a few more months honestly enough, but you are maintaining a mat that has done its work; see how long a mat lasts for what to look for.

There is a fourth case worth naming: you own a grippy open-cell mat and you still slide. Open-cell surfaces like polyurethane need moisture to work and get better as you sweat, so if you slip on one, the problem is usually that the mat is dry rather than wet. On that mat, a towel removes the thing that was working. Open cell versus closed cell explains which one you own.

Nubs versus a plain backing

Every towel here has the same job on top — absorb sweat and stay grippy while wet — and they differ almost entirely in what keeps them attached to the mat. That is the spec to shop on.

Silicone nubs. Hundreds of small raised dots across the underside, which is what the Yogitoes is known for. They bite into the mat surface and hold the towel in place from the first pose, dry or wet. The cost is a slightly knobbly feel under a bare knee and a towel that has to be laid out the right way up.

A grippy sheet backing. The Gaiam approach: one continuous non-slip layer instead of dots. Less positive than nubs on a very slick mat, and completely fine on an ordinary one. It also means there is nothing to feel through the fabric.

Nothing at all. The eQua is plain microfiber on both faces. It stays put through friction and moisture alone, so for the first few minutes of a cool practice it will shift, and in a hot room it behaves like it is glued down. This is the trade travelers accept, because a nub-free towel folds to nothing.

One thing no towel does is pad. A towel adds about the thickness of a tea towel, so if your knees are the complaint rather than your hands, you are looking at a denser mat or a knee pad instead.

The three, side by side

The specs above are the makers' published figures. The only one that changes the shopping decision is the length: two of these come in a version that matches a long mat and one does not.

Getting the length right

A standard yoga mat is 68 inches long and 24 inches wide, and a lot of better mats are 71 inches. Towels are sold against those numbers, so a 68-inch towel on a 71-inch mat leaves a strip of bare mat at one end — which is fine if that end is where your head goes in savasana, and annoying if it is where your hands land in downward dog.

Width matters more than people expect. A Manduka PRO is 26 inches wide, two inches wider than a standard mat, and a 24-inch towel on it leaves an inch of exposed mat down each side. That is harmless until you put a hand down at the edge of a wide stance and find the slippery part.

If you are taller than about five foot ten, buy the long version of whichever towel you choose and check that your mat is long enough to put it on. The size guide has the mat lengths worth knowing, and the taller-build roundup lists the mats that come in 79 and 85 inches.

Washing it without killing the grip

A towel that lives in a bag damp is the single most common way people end up disliking one. Three rules cover it, and all three come from the makers' own care instructions rather than from folklore.

No fabric softener, no dryer sheets. Manduka is explicit about this for the eQua: softeners and detergents containing softening agents coat the fibers and reduce grip. That is also the usual explanation when someone says their towel "stopped working" after a month.

Wash it cold, on its own. Silicone nubs and a drum full of denim are not friends, and the Gaiam towel is listed as a cold separate wash, dried flat. The eQua tolerates a low tumble dry. Follow the label rather than the fastest option.

Dry it flat or hung, never rolled inside the mat. A damp towel rolled into a mat is how a mat starts to smell, and the smell belongs to the mat afterwards, not the towel. Why does my yoga mat smell covers what to do when that has already happened, and the mat cleaner roundup covers what to spray the mat itself with.

How often depends entirely on how hot your practice is. A sweaty hour means the towel goes in the wash the same day; a gentle evening practice can go a week. The towel is washable, which is the entire argument for owning one rather than scrubbing the mat twice a week.