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Marichi's twist

Marichyasana III

hold 30 s each side · intermediate · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Twist gently, and not at all after recent back or abdominal surgery or with a disc problem that twisting aggravates.

Marichyasana III: sitting tall with the left leg straight and the right knee bent, its foot flat on the mat in front of the right sit bone. The shoulders turn about 75° to the right; the left upper arm presses against the outside of the right knee with the forearm upright, and the right hand rests on the mat behind the hips.

-15°Ankle dorsiflexion
139°Knee flexion
150°Hip flexion
4°Trunk from vertical
10°Arm to trunk
2°Elbow flexion
23Ankle spacing, cm
53Hand spacing, cm
-3Knee 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

Lower back
29 pts
Shoulders
12 pts
Abs and core
11 pts
Glutes
5 pts

Effort and your quota

3/10 effort3fatigue per set

Hold for 30 seconds on each side: 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: intermediate. One round counts like light conditioning work: 5 legs points, 12 push points, 39 core points.

Prime movers

Obliques (stretched), spinal erectors, quadratus lumborum, gluteus maximus of the bent leg (stretched), deltoids.

What to look for

  • Lift the spine first, then turn from the belly up.
  • Use the arm against the knee to stay tall, not to crank the twist.
  • Keep both sit bones down; the bent knee points straight up.
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.