When I first bought my new yoga mat, like many other people I didn’t give much consideration to the strap that came with it. It’s simply a way of carrying your mat, or so I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong, the best yoga strap can quickly become an essential extra part of your yoga practice.
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As I have become a more passionate yoga practitioner I feel, like many others, that yoga practice is not complete without the best yoga straps. The yoga straps that you buy for your mat are very important as they need to be right for you and your body. There’s no point buying something that looks nice but doesn’t give you the support or resistance you need in your yoga.
The best yoga strap helps you to assume and maintain yoga positions that my otherwise be impossible unaided. You can also use yoga straps for physical therapy following an injury or just to perform additional muscle stretches and warm ups that can help your yoga. The best yoga strap will help you to achieve deep stretching while reducing the risk of pulling any muscles and keeps you maintaining a full range of motion.
Let’s look in more detail at yoga straps and what they can offer you.
The Benefits of Using a Yoga Strap
Yoga is big business in the U.S. at the moment. The most recent Yoga in America study published in 2016 found the number of yoga practitioners was over 36 million, up 20.4 million since 2012. It shows 28 percent of all Americans have participated in a yoga class at some time in their lives. Many of these will have carried a mat to the class and not given a second thought to the strap.
The best yoga straps are now an essential purchase for many stretching exercises and yoga poses, with some not even fitting over your mat to carry it anymore. Lightweight and portable, yet made of sturdy fabrics, many straps come with their own pouches or can be easily slipped into your kit bag. A good-quality yoga strap will offer many benefits to your workout and yoga alike including:
Correcting Your Alignment and Form
If, like me, you’ve ever been guilty of overreaching in poses, not holding your back in the correct position or slumping at times, a yoga strap can help keep you in alignment while stretching. Maintaining your correct form reduces the risk of injury or muscle fatigue and your body being in the correct position allows your breath to flow easier making you feel less drowsy.
Better Balance and Stability
When you’re using better posture and correct form due to the yoga strap, your body will be perfectly in balance. No more falling over from tougher poses or wobbling around on the mat until you eventually fall over. With poses that require extending your legs out in front of you while standing, a strap gives you something to hold on to for more leverage.
Allow You to Track Your Progress
Most of the yoga straps you buy today feature several loops that you can use to track improvements in your flexibility or range of motion. As you progress you simply move to the next loop for a deeper and more challenging stretch. The benefits of better form, improved breathing and balance will help you to progress faster and hold poses for much longer.
Practice at Home Without a Partner
Some yoga asanas require a stretching partner for extra support. With a yoga strap, the strap becomes your partner which safely allows you to perform many stretches unassisted without any loss of control.
Reduce Injury When First Starting Out
It can be very tempting when first starting out at yoga to push yourself too hard. After all most of those poses tend to hurt, so how do you know when you’ve gone too far? Especially true for less flexible individuals, you can often try to hard to do a pose which ends up with stretching further than you should or rounding the lower back. A yoga strap allows for you to comfortably perform those more challenging poses while maintaining a full range of motion without the risk of injury.
The following YouTube video shows just how you can incorporate a yoga strap into your practice of yoga.
The Best Yoga Strap
With so many different yoga straps available it can be difficult to know which one to choose. You want a strap that’s durable yet lightweight enough to easily carry, if it fits your mat even better still. We’ve looked at many of the top-selling straps to bring you, in our opinion, the contenders for best yoga strap.
Our Choice
You may have thought a yoga strap was just for carrying your mat to class and back, but they’re so much versatile than that. The best yoga strap will be something you attach to your mat but can also be used for stretching exercises and to give additional support to some yoga poses.
The best yoga strap is an essential for any serious yoga students or yogi. The strap helps the student in maintaining the correct alignment when performing various stretches and gives extra length to achieve bound poses. Remember yoga straps aren’t just for yoga, they can also be used by dancers, Pilates enthusiasts or people who may be in physical therapy.
The strong woven nylon material, included exercise book and good-quality brand name makes the Original Stretch Out Strap by OPTP, the best yoga strap, in our opinion, you can buy today. It might be only available in one color, but a strap is about so much more than color. If it bothers you that much, why not try to get a mat the same color, unless you really don’t like green!
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