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Bow

Dhanurasana

hold 15 s · intermediate · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Lift less, or do half bow one leg at a time, if the lower back strains; skip it with a back injury that bending backward aggravates, and during pregnancy.

Dhanurasana with a strap, as most classes offer it: lying face down, knees bent hip-width, a strap looped round the fronts of the ankles and held in both hands. The feet kick back into the strap, which lifts the chest about 30° and the thighs about 22° off the mat; the body rocks onto the belly and the straight arms are pulled back. With open enough shoulders the hands hold the ankles instead.

-20°Ankle dorsiflexion
92°Knee flexion
6°Hip flexion
86°Trunk from vertical
19°Arm to trunk
27°Elbow flexion
32Ankle spacing, cm
49Hand spacing, cm
-4Knee 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.

Shoulder, per side
11 / 11

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
Hamstrings
22 pts
Upper back
12 pts
Quads
5 pts
Abs and core
4 pts
Chest
4 pts
Shoulders
4 pts

Effort and your quota

7.5/10 effort7.5fatigue per set

Hold for 15 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: intermediate. One round counts like light conditioning work: 56 legs points, 7 push points, 12 pull points, 39 core points.

Prime movers

Spinal erectors, gluteus maximus, hamstrings, quadriceps (stretched), hip flexors (stretched), pectoralis major (stretched), anterior deltoid (stretched), rhomboids.

What to look for

  • Knees no wider than the hips.
  • Kick the feet back into the strap (or the hands); that kick lifts the chest and thighs.
  • Shoulders roll back; lift the chest forward rather than cranking the lower back.
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.