Move into the poseBalanced over midfoot
Side view
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Standing backbend

Anuvittasana

hold 10 s · beginner · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Lean back only a little with a sensitive lower back, and skip it with a back injury that bending backward aggravates or with dizziness.

Anuvittasana. Feet hip-width, legs straight with soft knees; the arms sweep up overhead, shoulder-width apart, then the chest lifts and the whole spine arches back, most in the upper back, the hips pressing forward a little so the centre of mass stays over the feet (solved). The arms stay in line with the ears and the gaze rises.

7°Ankle dorsiflexion
3°Knee flexion
4°Hip flexion
0°Trunk from vertical
6°Arm to trunk
4°Elbow flexion
18Ankle spacing, cm
51Hand spacing, cm
0Knee outside ankle, cm
–Knee cave, ° inside toe line
50 / 50Load left / right, %
0Pelvis drop, cm

Load and joint demand

Bodyweight: no weights. Joint demand below is your own body's weight in this position.

Lower back
3 / 27
Hip flexors
1 / 16
Knee flexors
10 / 10
Calves
29 / 29
Shoulder, per side
1 / 12

N·m now / peak over the rep.

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
Glutes
29 pts
Shoulders
11 pts
Abs and core
5 pts
Lats
4 pts
Chest
4 pts

Effort and your quota

5.5/10 effort5.5fatigue per set

Hold for 10 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: beginner. One round counts like light conditioning work: 29 legs points, 15 push points, 4 pull points, 40 core points.

Prime movers

Spinal erectors, gluteus maximus, deltoids (holding the arms up), abdominals and hip flexors (stretched), pectoralis major and latissimus dorsi (stretched).

What to look for

  • Press the hips forward and squeeze the glutes; lift the chest before you lean back.
  • Arch from the upper back, not by folding in the lower back.
  • Keep the neck long; look back only as far as is comfortable.
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.