Lift
Side view
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Diamond press

8 reps · beginner

Take care: Not during pregnancy or after giving birth while lying face down is uncomfortable; keep the lift small with a back problem.

Lying face down with the hands stacked in a diamond on the mat in front of the forehead, fingertips touching and the elbows wide, the legs long. The head, neck and chest lift a little off the mat, the forearms pressing lightly into it and the eyes looking down, then lower back to the hands. The pelvis and the legs stay on the mat.

-70°Ankle dorsiflexion
2°Knee flexion
6°Hip flexion
84°Trunk from vertical
143°Arm to trunk
119°Elbow flexion
26Ankle spacing, cm
14Hand 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

Lower back
35 pts
Upper back
29 pts
Abs and core
12 pts

Effort and your quota

4/10 effort4fatigue per set

8 slow, controlled reps. Pilates 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: 29 pull points, 47 core points.

Prime movers

Spinal erectors (upper back), lower trapezius, rhomboids, deep neck flexors (keeping the neck long), transversus abdominis.

What to look for

  • Slide the shoulder blades down the back before you lift.
  • Lift only the head and the chest; the lower ribs stay down.
  • Keep the eyes on the mat and the back of the neck long.
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.