Lift, reach and sweep
Side view
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Breaststroke prep

6 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 on the mat by the forehead and the elbows wide. The head and chest lift a little as the arms reach forward, sweep out to the sides and round to beside the hips, like a breaststroke; then the elbows bend, the hands slide back up by the shoulders and the chest lowers. The legs stay long on the mat.

-70°Ankle dorsiflexion
2°Knee flexion
3°Hip flexion
90°Trunk from vertical
107°Arm to trunk
120°Elbow flexion
26Ankle spacing, cm
58Hand 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.

Shoulder, per side
8 / 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

Upper back
35 pts
Lats
16 pts
Lower back
12 pts
Triceps
12 pts

Effort and your quota

4/10 effort4fatigue per set

6 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: 12 push points, 51 pull points, 12 arms points, 12 core points.

Prime movers

Lower trapezius, rhomboids, posterior deltoid, latissimus dorsi, spinal erectors, triceps (reaching).

What to look for

  • Lift the chest only as high as you can keep the belly drawn in.
  • Reach, open, sweep: the arms move from the shoulder blades.
  • Neck long, eyes on the mat just ahead.
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.