Marley

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A strong Knee pit grip is needed before working on this move and you’ll see several related tutorials to help you prepare or improve on this trick. You don’t need to pull on the foot to be or feel secure in this pose. If you rely mostly on pulling on the leg, you can injure your knee. It’s much safer to wait and build up the strength of your hamstrings to hold this pose.

Gemini

Side leg hook crunch

Planks

Spinal contractions

Strengthens: HAMSTRINGS / GLUTES /OBLIQUES/ ERECTOR SPINAE (THE BACK)

Responses

  1. If you make sure to push your hips forward and press the bottom thigh into the pole as you grab the foot of the hooked knee, you can open your hooked knee slightly and roll the pressure of the pole out of the knee socket and more into the back of the top thigh! but yes, definitely not for everyone to grab that top foot 🙂

  2. The problem with teaching to grab the top foot is that most will not realize or remember, even when you tell them, to use the hamstring and bottom thigh to hold the pose. So often they rely only on pulling hard on the foot :/

  3. Veena, when I let my hand go, I become almost completely vertical, instead of horizontal. O can do the other kinds of knee holds and the jasmine no problem so I don’t think it’s knee strength holding me…

  4. this is a terrific modified inversion for my injury. I’m compiling a list right now of moves that don’t put a lot of strain on the arms while I’m healing.

  5. Working on this today and I must say I am so glad I have my crash-mat because it caught about three or four face-plants ^_^ I think I really need to focus on squeezing that hamstring and pushing on that bottom thigh!

  6. My instructor decided to help me with “Marley prep” when I asked her to show me this tonight. Haha. No worries. I think I’ll work on what she showed me before I try going into the full deal

  7. So glad I decided to finally come back to this and try it this morning. Nailed it! I found securing the hooked leg with the free one first and then letting go, or grabbing the free leg instead of the hooked one, is a lot easier. And it’s painless.

  8. Played around with Marley again today. Veena, when you do this move with the free leg ankle crossed over the knee of the hooked leg what is this called? Or is it just a Marley variation I must have seen somewhere?

  9. Excited to try this again for #svbackarchmarch and play with some of the arm variations !! Thank you for this lovely video. I’m definitely in the “no grabbing my leg when in a knee put grip” camp and it’s good to see that validated here. My progress may be a bit slower but when I can nail it I feel 100% secure.

  10. 😩 this Marley is a bit scary for me …I shall attempt what I can for SVbackarchmarch challenge… but I already know it’s going to be a struggle. 🙈

  11. Don’t worry about lettingetting go right away, just keep at it and get your body use to the postion and build the strength needed in the legs and core. 💖

  12. Much like another user mentioned, I also injured my lateral gastrocnemius pulling on my top leg the first time I tried this move. I can hold a (very non-flexy) cocoon no problem and have a solid knee-pit grip, so I’m going to try this method of Marley. Thanks for the lesson, Veena! 🙂