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Frog

Mandukasana

hold 60 s · intermediate · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Put blankets under the knees and go only as wide as is comfortable; skip it with a groin strain or a knee that hurts, and during pregnancy.

Mandukasana, the wide-knee frog most classes teach: from tabletop the knees slide out wide to the sides, each bent about 90° with the shin straight back along the mat, the inner knees and the tops of the feet down. The hips sink back level with the knees and the chest lowers onto the forearms, elbows under the shoulders.

-78°Ankle dorsiflexion
90°Knee flexion
78°Hip flexion
78°Trunk from vertical
67°Arm to trunk
26°Elbow flexion
20Ankle spacing, cm
40Hand spacing, cm
0Knee 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
16 pts
Shoulders
11 pts
Adductors
11 pts

Effort and your quota

2.5/10 effort2.5fatigue per set

Hold for 60 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: intermediate. One round counts like light conditioning work: 11 legs points, 11 push points, 16 core points.

Prime movers

Adductors (stretched), hip internal rotators (stretched), deltoids and serratus anterior (holding the chest), spinal erectors.

What to look for

  • Widen the knees only as far as the inner thighs stretch without pain.
  • Keep the knees in line with the hips, ankles in line with the knees.
  • Pad the knees; rest on the forearms and breathe into the inner thighs.
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.