Lift and beat
Side view
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Heel beats

3 reps · beginner

Take care: Not during pregnancy or after giving birth while lying face down is uncomfortable; keep the legs lower if the lower back pinches.

Lying face down with the forehead resting on the stacked hands, the straight legs turned out from the hips and lifted a few centimetres off the mat, the heels beat together and apart quickly, twenty times, the hip bones staying heavy on the mat; then the legs lower.

-65°Ankle dorsiflexion
2°Knee flexion
6°Hip flexion
84°Trunk from vertical
136°Arm to trunk
126°Elbow flexion
26Ankle spacing, cm
24Hand 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

Glutes
35 pts
Hamstrings
29 pts
Adductors
16 pts
Lower back
12 pts
Abs and core
12 pts

Effort and your quota

7/10 effort7fatigue per set

3 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: 80 legs points, 25 core points.

Prime movers

Gluteus maximus, hamstrings, deep hip rotators (turning out), adductors (beating the heels together), spinal erectors, transversus abdominis.

What to look for

  • Lengthen the legs away before you lift them: long, not high.
  • Small, quick beats from the inner thighs; the pelvis stays still.
  • Draw the belly in as if lifting it off the mat.
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.