Exercise mats serve two main purposes: to protect you from your floor and to protect your floor from you. No one likes to lie down on a cold, hard floor for their training, and any heavy weights you use can easily damage the floor if you don’t put a protective barrier in place. It’s also wise to put a mat down under home cardio machines because these can move mid-workout and leave scratches.
You can opt for a cheap, lightweight exercise mat if you’re just using it to try out the best bodyweight exercises, while more substantial options are best if you’re using free weights or putting a cardio machine on it. The latter option will set you back a bit more, but just think about how much you’ve saved on replacement flooring the next time your heaviest dumbbells clatter to the floor after a drop set.
The Best Exercise Mats
At 10mm thick, this mat is both comfortable and padded enough to use with light weights. However, its relatively slender 24in width means you have to be careful where you put those weights down. Its ridged underside should provide some extra grip on polished floors, and we like that it comes with a handy carry strap to sling over your shoulder.
If you’re looking for the cheapest mat that will get the job done, this is it. The Nyamba mat is not large, with a surface area of just 55.1in x 19.7in, so it isn’t a great option for yoga but it does provide an adequately soft surface for strength workouts. It’s 6.5mm thick and rolls up into a tight bundle that’s easy to store – one benefit of the shorter length – and it has a striped underside that provides secure grip.
In the UK, this mat is called the Domyos XS Pilates floor mat and costs £2.99.
There isn’t too much room for clever design innovations with exercise mats, but the team at Les Mills have managed it here. The MBX mat has two different surfaces, with the red side designed to help you grip with bare feet during yoga sessions and the grey side built for high-intensity workouts done in shoes. So you can smash out your HIIT workout, then flip the mat for some recovery yoga.
It’s certainly not cheap (you can find more wallet-friendly options in our yoga mat round-up) but the Liforme yoga mat has a few outstanding features that might make it worth the outlay for keen practitioners. The first is the reliable grip it offers even when wet, so you shouldn’t slip during your poses no matter how much sweat hits it, and it has an alignment system printed on the mat that will help to ensure you’re in the right position. It’s also a notably spacious mat, which is handy for taller people.
This hardy PVC mat is wide enough to accommodate treadmills, exercise bikes and rowers, as well as weight benches or dumbbell racks. It will provide some scuff protection for your floor but it’s not the thickest mat, so it doesn’t completely dampen the sound of the machine from the floors beneath you. However, the thinner design is useful if you like to keep your equipment out of sight, because it’s easy to roll up and store away. The main quibble we have with this design is that it’s relatively small for something that slots under a machine – a larger mat would catch more perspiration.
