There isnt anything more annoying than rolling out your sticky yoga mat and seeing a film of sweat and grime or smelling the not so lovely smell of sweat from your last few sessions. Yet, we still experience these occurrences because cleaning our yoga mats is most of the time something we only think of when its too late. If you stop and think about it, our dealy beloved mats soak up and absorb all the sweat that we expose them to during our grueling yoga sessions which leads to them obviously becoming dirty and riddled with germs.
The whole point of yoga is to cleanse your body. Even though the cleansing goes on internally, that does not mean that we can disregard the cleanliness of our yoga mat. If you are struggling to remember when the last time that your mat got a good clean then it most certainly is time to give it one now.
In a recent study, researchers tested the mat of an avid yoga practitioner who admitted to not cleaning her mat very often. The results are quite shocking. The mat tested positive for 12 million particles of bacteria. To put that into perspective, a normal amount of environmental bacteria is around the 3 million mark. The type of fungus and germs that are responsible for causing athletes foot, staph infections, including others are routinely found on yoga mats. In fact, they actually thrive on them since most of the time yoga mats are moist and warm, an environment that causes them to multiply out of control.
So, neglecting cleaning your yoga mat is quite obviously pretty nasty and not a good idea. A very important aspect of cleaning a yoga mat is to only just wipe it down because doing that is not going to kill any germs. All that will do is remove visible dirt but germs and bacteria are still going to be left on the mat. You have to clean it and disinfect it at the same time.
The best approach to cleaning a yoga mat no matter what disinfectant method you use should always involve a microfiber cloth or Dredge mop. Microfiber is going to actually remove germs instead of cotton that just moves germs around. If cleaning your mat is something you hate doing then use a large flat microfiber mop which will take you a couple of seconds to wipe down your mat with. With a tool like that, there really is no excuse for not having enough time to clean your mat.
