Move into the pose
Side view
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Easy seat twist

Parivrtta Sukhasana

hold 30 s each side · beginner · 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.

Parivrtta Sukhasana, sitting cross-legged on a block (the right shin in front): the spine lengthens, then the shoulders turn about 50° to the right of the hips; the left hand moves from the left knee across to the outside of the right knee and the right hand comes to the mat behind the right hip.

-54°Ankle dorsiflexion
123°Knee flexion
89°Hip flexion
6°Trunk from vertical
40°Arm to trunk
85°Elbow flexion
9Ankle spacing, cm
56Hand spacing, cm
40Knee 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
Abs and core
11 pts

Effort and your quota

2.5/10 effort2.5fatigue 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: beginner. One round counts like light conditioning work: 39 core points.

Prime movers

Obliques (stretched), spinal erectors and spinal rotators, quadratus lumborum, hip rotators (gently stretched).

What to look for

  • Sit tall first; twist from the belly up, the head turning last.
  • Keep both sit bones heavy on the block.
  • Lengthen on the in-breath, turn a little further on the out-breath.
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.