Mat exercises

Is a mat even equipment?

Not the way a barbell or a resistance band is. A mat loads nothing and makes nothing mechanically easier. It does two things: it cushions your spine, knees and elbows in lying and kneeling positions, and it gives you a stable, non-slip patch where a hand or a foot will not slide. The sit-up description starts with putting a mat under your lower back, and that is the whole of its role.

Which is why this category has no progression in the usual sense. There is no smallest plate here, no shorter band, no pin one notch lower. Your range does get better from week to week, but it depends on so many things at once - body temperature, time of day, what you did earlier - that treating it like a number on the bar leads nowhere.

The one strength exercise in the set is the sit-up, and even that uses the mat purely as padding under the lower back.

When does stretching make sense?

The catalog answers that itself on the cat stretch: as part of a cool-down, or when you want to take tension out of your back. Most of the descriptions call for holding the position 15 to 30 seconds and repeating it on both sides - that is not a training protocol, it is just how a single position is performed.

The choice is simpler than it looks: stretch what is actually bothering you. After a day at a desk that is usually the hip flexors and the front of the shoulders. After running, calves and hamstrings. After heavy squats, quads. This category is split by muscle group, so instead of working through all of it in order, open the one that is talking to you.

Comfort is the limit. That line the descriptions keep coming back to, stretching "only as far as is comfortable", is not legal cover - in a position where you are fighting pain the muscle tenses up reflexively and the point of the stretch is gone.