Sunday, August 5, 2007

Sweaty palms.

My hands seem to be the first parts of my body to get sweaty. And since I really like the fast-paced, sweat inducing vinyasa yoga, this makes movement a tad difficult. This is something I struggled with for the past couple of years since, not only am I a sweater, I'm also lanky and hence not as strong as stockier yogis.

The solutions, as I identified them, were:

1. Practice on a towel, or buy a yoga towel.
Unfortunately, this increases schlepping to and from yoga class. Plus I'd have to
do more laundry. No thanks.
2. Wear gloves.
I just can't bring myself to wear gloves (or even one glove, a la Michael
Jackson). I'm a minimalist, and like to only have my mat and some relaxed
clothing. This doesn't include gloves. Plus, it looks dumb.
3. Getting a better mat.
This is
the solution I pursued. First, I thought this woven cotton mat would
solve all of my problems. It didn't. The cotton is stretchy, which makes any pose
using two opposing anchor points a problem. (Like any warrior. My hands stuck to
the mat, but in this case, the mat moved.)

Here's the best mat I found. It's made of renewable rubber, comes in different thicknesses and colors, and is really sticky. Well worth the higher than the average mat's sticker price.