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11 best yoga equipment pieces: How to practice at home during lockdown

Enhance your savasana or relax into child's pose with the accessories proven to help

Liz Dodd
Tuesday 07 April 2020 15:30 BST
With studios closed, turn your space into a private studio and get stretching
With studios closed, turn your space into a private studio and get stretching

Yoga is a lifeline when you’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed, which is why it’s more important than ever to keep up your practice during the coronavirus lockdown.

With studios closed for the foreseeable future, this is a great time to turn your home into a private yoga studio and invest in props that will help you relax, restore or stretch out after a long day working from home.

If you don’t have an established practice and you can’t get to class, there are a wealth of online resources to help. Many studios have started livestreaming practices – including London’s Lifecentre and Triyoga.

Our reviewers have put together a list of accessories that are perfect for any yoga style – starting with the foundation, a mat, and building up – then adding in a few luxurious extras, like an eye pillow and aromatherapy oil.

If your usual practice is flow-based, or you want to stay active at home, you can get your studio off the ground with just a few props: a brick and a strap are helpful for alignment and support. Use them where you feel like you’re over-stretching to reach the ground.

Slow, long-hold practices like yin and restorative yoga are prop intensive, but also luxurious, and an ideal practice to delve into if you are feeling anxious and overwhelmed: start with a bolster, which will make you more comfortable in some poses, and an eye pillow.

We tested multi-style equipment like the brick and strap in flow-based practices – vinyasa and ashtanga – and then slowed right down and indulged in some two-hour restorative and yin practices to put the stress-busting props through their paces.

If you’re just starting out with restorative yoga, or you want to try it to help with stress, bear in mind that setting up the props can feel intimidating at first: arranging some poses can feel more like building flat pack furniture than yoga.

But once you’re in the pose you could be there for up to 15 minutes, so it’s worth putting the time in. At the start, aim for a short practice of two or three poses, so you don’t give up. Try to see the process of setting up your bolster, bricks and blanket as part of your yoga practice: you are, quite literally, giving yourself some support.

You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections, which are formed from real-world testing and expert advice. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.

The verdict: Yoga equipment

Complete Unity’s meditation cushion is a prop you will use in every practice, and can support any additional meditation or pranayama you do seated. For a prop you will use on and off the mat, buy the bamboo hoody – we now lives in ours.

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