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Ball bridge

10 reps · beginner

A pelvic curl with a small soft ball held between the knees: lying on the back with the knees bent and the feet flat, the hips lift until shoulders, hips and knees make one line, the knees gently squeezing the ball, then the spine lowers back down.

-20°Ankle dorsiflexion
131°Knee flexion
61°Hip flexion
90°Trunk from vertical
36°Arm to trunk
71°Elbow flexion
20Ankle spacing, cm
60Hand spacing, cm
3Knee 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
22 pts
Lower back
16 pts
Abs and core
12 pts

Effort and your quota

7.5/10 effort7.5fatigue per set

10 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: 86 legs points, 28 core points.

Prime movers

Gluteus maximus, hamstrings, adductors (squeezing the ball), spinal erectors, transversus abdominis.

What to look for

  • Squeeze the ball lightly the whole time so the knees stay hip-width.
  • Peel the spine up from the tailbone; stop when the ribs would lift.
  • Weight through the whole foot and the shoulders, never the neck.
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.