Lift into the star
Side view
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Star

4 reps each side · advanced

Take care: Build up from the side plank on the knee; skip it with a wrist or shoulder injury.

A straight-arm side plank on the right hand, the hand under the shoulder and the body in one line from head to feet, resting on the side of the bottom foot. The top arm reaches to the ceiling; then the top leg lifts to about 40° and the top arm reaches overhead, making a star, and both lower again; then the other side.

-10°Ankle dorsiflexion
2°Knee flexion
1°Hip flexion
62°Trunk from vertical
62°Arm to trunk
20°Elbow flexion
0Ankle spacing, cm
3Hand spacing, cm
1Knee outside ankle, cm
–Knee cave, ° inside toe line
–Load left / right, %
-15Pelvis 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

Glutes
35 pts
Abs and core
29 pts
Lower back
22 pts
Shoulders
12 pts
Adductors
12 pts

Effort and your quota

6.5/10 effort6.5fatigue per set

4 slow, controlled reps on each side. Pilates 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: 47 legs points, 12 push points, 51 core points.

Prime movers

Gluteus medius and minimus, obliques, quadratus lumborum, transversus abdominis, deltoids and serratus anterior (the supporting arm), adductors of the bottom leg.

What to look for

  • Stack the shoulder over the wrist and lift the hips out of the bottom side.
  • Lift the top leg from the hip without the pelvis rolling back.
  • Reach long through the top hand and the top foot: a five-pointed star.
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.