Did you know modern yoga mats originated in 1967 after a lady named Angela Farmer had trouble holding yoga poses due to prior surgery making the majority of her body unable to sweat.
This meant that her body did not provide a natural source of grip to the flooring and as a result of that, she would often slip on flooring when barefoot and drop plates.
As you can imagine, this would make holding difficult poses (or even easy poses) next to impossible!
Exhausted by her Yoga troubles, Angela came across a rug pad underlay produced by a small family owned company in southern Germany. She found it solved all of her troubles and started using it during yoga class.
The 'sticky yoga mat' idea spread like wild-fire from there and the rest is history!
Yoga began to pick up speed in popularity shortly there-after and really started to take off as a mainstream form of fitness in the 2000's.
In Australia there are now countless yoga studios such as "my asana" in Bondi, teaching all kinds of variants of Yoga such as Vinyasa, Hatha and even more modern developments such as power yoga which does still have roots in Vinyasa.
So there you have it! The yoga mats we know of today found their origin in rug pads nearly 50 years ago and it's all thanks to a yoga teacher born in London, who found a great solution to a medical based problem she was having and helped speed up the spread of Yoga throughout the world.
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