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Forearm stand

Pincha Mayurasana

hold 20 s · advanced · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Learn it at a wall with a teacher; skip it with a shoulder or neck injury, high blood pressure, glaucoma or a heart condition, and during pregnancy.

Pincha Mayurasana: the forearms parallel and shoulder-width on the mat, palms flat, the upper arms vertical with the shoulders over the elbows; the body upside down and vertical over them, the head free of the mat and the gaze between the hands. One leg rises first and the other joins it, as it does when you lift up from dolphin.

-35°Ankle dorsiflexion
15°Knee flexion
66°Hip flexion
174°Trunk from vertical
174°Arm to trunk
84°Elbow flexion
19Ankle spacing, cm
38Hand spacing, cm
1Knee outside ankle, cm
–Knee cave, ° inside toe line
–Load left / right, %
0Pelvis drop, cm

Load and joint demand

Bodyweight: no weights. Joint demand below is your own body's weight in this position.

No gravity-based joint demand to show for this exercise.

Faults

Faults grow with knee bend and apply to lifts standing on the floor. The fault check flags a knee caving more than 10° inside the line of the toes and a load split beyond 60/40. Knee cave shows best in the front camera.

Body

Femur changes keep standing height fixed by shortening or lengthening the torso. Longer femurs force more forward lean in any squat.

Muscles worked

Shoulders
35 pts
Upper back
29 pts
Triceps
12 pts
Abs and core
12 pts
Lower back
12 pts
Glutes
12 pts

Effort and your quota

5/10 effort5fatigue per set

Hold for 20 seconds: move into the pose slowly, breathe steadily, and come out the way you went in. Yoga is practised for control, balance and mobility, never to failure, so this does not change with your limits.

Level: advanced. One round counts like light conditioning work: 12 legs points, 47 push points, 29 pull points, 12 arms points, 25 core points.

Prime movers

Deltoids, trapezius, serratus anterior, rotator cuff, triceps, rectus abdominis, transversus abdominis, spinal erectors, gluteus maximus.

What to look for

  • Elbows no wider than the shoulders; press the forearms and the wrists down.
  • Draw the ribs in and reach up through the legs rather than arching.
  • Learn it at a wall, with a strap round the upper arms to keep the elbows in.
How the model works, and its limits

One 3D skeleton drives both views. Segment lengths and widths are Winter's anthropometric ratios of height; segment masses and centre-of-mass positions follow Dempster's data. For free-standing lifts the whole-body angle is found numerically so the combined centre of mass of lifter and load sits over the middle of the foot. Arms and legs use two-link inverse kinematics with a pole direction. Rep timing follows a minimum-jerk profile.

Balance is quasi-static, so ballistic lifts are shown slowed down. Cable pull and pad support forces are not modelled. The spine is one rigid segment and joints have no range-of-motion limits or muscle forces.