What Flooring is Best for Hot Yoga?

While hot yoga is certainly nothing new, it’s clear that it is a rapidly emerging program that health clubs are now looking to incorporate. It’s no longer something only offered by specialty yoga studios, but a discipline that is growing more and more mainstream in established gyms.

There are many types of hot yoga, but probably the best known is Bikram. In this discipline, most parts of the environment are strictly mandated, including the use of only carpeted areas. Additionally, Bikram’s other mandates prevent it from being taught in most commercial clubs — so most clubs use another form of hot yoga or a slightly altered form of Bikram.

Given the conditions that exist, can a club hold hot yoga in any room of its facility? How the flooring in that room reacts to the heat is one consideration, and there are numerous flooring options available, including carpeting, seamless foam mats and dense foam flooring — but the majority of people actually use wood.

That may surprise you, as it does many of the people who look for suitable flooring for this area. They believe the extreme heat of 100 degrees or more will be damaging to wood, but that’s not really the problem — wood will perform fine in heat. It’s the resulting humidity that will cause problems with wood during hot yoga.

Even Bikram recognizes that with increased heat, humidity needs to be controlled, and recommendations for climate are that the studio be 105 degrees with a relative humidity of 40 percent. This would be perfectly appropriate for wood flooring, if wood were allowed in Bikram studios. But, if you are running a hot yoga class on wood flooring, it’s crucial that the humidity be strictly controlled.

Admittedly, that’s not easy to accomplish. In a closed room with a number of participants exercising in this type of heat, the humidity can rapidly rise, even as much as 10 percent in just an hour. In fact, that’s true whether you host hot yoga classes or not. Group exercise typically involves a lot of higher energy moves when compared to yoga, so the participants can sweat just as much as they do in hot yoga, and the humidity of the room can rapidly elevate here as well.

High humidity can cause wood floors to buckle as the fibers swell from absorbing the moisture in the air. As the wood swells, it begins to push up against the wall. Once it is tight to the walls and still taking on moisture, the wood will start to hump up in the middle because it has nowhere else to go. It doesn’t take a lot of expansion of each board for this to happen when you consider how many rows of boards there are in your group exercise floor.

Fortunately, this can be fixed by simply de-humidifying the floor. This will sink it back down into place over the course of a few days, with no permanent damage to the floor. But, it is best to constantly monitor the humidity so that this doesn’t occur in the first place. Try to make sure the humidity in the room never exceeds 50 percent.

Constant monitoring is also crucial because the environment can rapidly change. This year, in the eastern United States, we experienced a very cool summer, but recently had a huge swing in heat. This sudden increase in heat and humidity caused our air conditioners to suddenly work overtime, and many of them could no longer keep up. If they shut down or were unable to work at full capacity, this allowed the humidity in the room to rapidly increase and caused a number of floors to begin buckling before the clubs’ staffs had realized there was a problem. Dehumidifying these areas brought the floors back down after several days, but the problem could have been avoided altogether if someone had been monitoring the humidity daily.

Wood is definitely the best surface to use for hot yoga, since it will not absorb sweat as much as other yoga surfaces can. Just monitor the humidity to keep it at an appropriate level, and leave it to your participants to worry about sweating it out.

Steve Chase is the General Manager of Fitness Flooring. He can be contacted at 800.428.5306 or by e-mail at Steve@fitnessfloors.com.