Swivel, swivel, swivel, kick
Side view
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Can-can

6 reps · intermediate

Take care: Skip it with wrist or shoulder pain or a weak lower back (lean on the forearms to make it easier), and during pregnancy.

Sitting and leaning back about 45° on straight arms, the hands on the mat behind the hips, the knees bent and together with the feet lifted just off the mat. The knees swivel to the right, the left and the right, then both legs kick out straight on a high diagonal and bend back in. The chest stays lifted and the knees stay glued together.

-30°Ankle dorsiflexion
80°Knee flexion
87°Hip flexion
45°Trunk from vertical
96°Arm to trunk
31°Elbow flexion
25Ankle spacing, cm
42Hand spacing, cm
-2Knee 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

Abs and core
35 pts
Quads
12 pts
Upper back
12 pts
Triceps
12 pts
Adductors
6 pts

Effort and your quota

4/10 effort4fatigue per set

6 slow, controlled reps. Pilates 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: 18 legs points, 12 push points, 12 pull points, 12 arms points, 35 core points.

Prime movers

Obliques (swivelling), rectus abdominis, transversus abdominis, hip flexors, quadriceps (kicking), adductors (keeping the knees together), triceps and posterior deltoid (supporting on the hands).

What to look for

  • Keep the chest lifted and the shoulders away from the ears.
  • Swivel from the waist; the knees stay together.
  • Kick on the breath out, long through the toes, then bend in with control.
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.