How this site works
AyurPathic compares yoga mats on numbers that can be checked. We do not test mats in a studio and we do not pretend to. What we do is keep a catalogue of 15 mats from 6 brands, read their Amazon prices once a day, and show every figure with the date it was read.
Where the specs come from
We take thickness, size, weight, material, country of manufacture and guarantee from the manufacturer's own product page. Each mat page links to the page we used and shows when we last checked it. When a maker publishes no figure, we leave that row out rather than fill it with an estimate.
That has an obvious limit. Makers describe their own products, and some figures, density above all, nobody publishes at all. Where a number does not exist, we say so rather than invent a rating in its place.
Where the prices come from
Prices come from the Amazon Product API, read once a day, and every one of them carries the date it was read. What you see follows three rules:
- A price older than three days is not shown at all. An out-of-date price is worse than no price.
- Where a mat has no live Amazon listing, the page says so. It does not fall back to a list price dressed up as a current one.
- Where the API returns a listing that no longer matches the model, we discard the price and drop the listing from our tables. Amazon remaps listings to different products more often than people expect.
The last of those is not theoretical. On our first run one listing we had recorded as a Manduka PROlite had become a listing for the Manduka PRO. The check caught it, and the site never showed the wrong number.
How rankings are decided
Pages like "best mat for hot yoga" are ranked by a score computed from published specs and the current price. Each page states the weights in plain words: grip when wet counts for this much, thickness for that much. The order is recomputed on every build. No brand pays for placement, and there would be nothing to pay for. The ranking is arithmetic over data we did not choose.
One rule sits on top of the arithmetic: a mat that cannot be bought today does not take the top recommendation, even if it scores highest. When that happens the page says which mat scored higher and why it is not the pick.
What we do not claim
We are not a medical site. Yoga equipment is equipment: a thicker mat puts more material between your knee and the floor, and that is the whole of the claim. You will not find advice here about what yoga does for your health, because we are not qualified to give it and a site that gives it badly does real harm.
You will also not find star ratings here. We measured nothing that would justify one, and a number invented to look like a measurement is worse than no number at all.
How we make money
Links to Amazon carry an affiliate tag, and a purchase made through one earns us a commission at no extra cost to you. That commission does not depend on which mat you buy, and the ranking code has no access to it. Every page that carries such a link says so on the page itself.
Corrections
If a spec is wrong, a listing points at the wrong product, or a mat is missing that should be here, write to [email protected] with the model and what you saw. Data is the fastest thing here to fix: one record changes and every page that mentions it follows.