This one stretch changed the game for me when I was recovering from a tough abs workout

A woman performs a cobra stretch on a yoga mat. Her legs are straight with thighs facing the floor, while her torso is held upright by her straightened arms. Behind her we see a whitewashed brick wall.

Abs workouts are grueling, but they’re necessary if you want to maintain your mobility as you age. While many people think that abs refers to the six-pack muscles, they also include deeper core muscles of the torso, such as the obliques, which run down your flanks.

I’ve added some new moves to my regular workout routine to make sure I’m targeting all of these muscles effectively. My new and improved workout now involves weighted crunches, legs-up weighted crunches, and weighted Russian twists.

After the first couple of sessions, my lower belly was sore for days, sometimes up to five—I needed to figure out a way to stretch the area thoroughly. I looked into some yoga poses that could help and discovered the cobra stretch, which I only knew as part of a Sun Salutation. I decided to learn how to do it properly and incorporate it into my cool-down routine.

How to do the cobra stretch

I asked Kait Ireland, a physical therapist and owner of Empowered Athletics Physical Therapy, to walk me through a cobra stretch (aka a prone press-up) and show me how to perform one correctly.

Physical therapist Kait Ireland demonstrates a cobra pose (Image credit: Empowered Athletics Physical Therapy)

1. Lay flat on the floor (tummy side down) and press your trunk up using your arms.
2. Feel the stretch through the front line of the body and the rectus abdominis or six-pack muscles
3. Hold for three to five deep breaths

My results

Holding this pose and breathing deeply helped my recovery time and eased my sore muscles. I still felt the impact of the workout for a day or two after, but it wasn’t bugging me every time I tried to reach a high shelf up to five days later, as it had before.

I found that if I placed my arms further out from my body when doing the stretch, as demonstrated by Ireland, I really felt it in my lower belly. But I also found that if I brought my hands forward, to just in front of my hips, I could feel the stretch more in my upper abdominals (which the crunches had also targeted).

I now do the stretch immediately after my workout and then again for a day or two afterward to feel the full benefits. Every time I get back on the mat to do it, I find I can press deeper into the pose and give my muscles more of a stretch, loosening them and helping them relax. I even feel the stretch in my oblique muscles, although maybe not as effectively as a twisting stretch like a seated twist.

Shop yoga mats

It's a good idea to have something soft rolled out when you're doing post-exercise stretches. The options below all feature in our round-up of the best yoga mats and will shield your hip bones from hard surfaces when performing this move.

Jade yoga travel mat

Liforme yoga mat

Manduka Pro Lite Yoga Mat