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Bakasana

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

Take care: Put a cushion in front of you while learning; skip it with wrist or elbow pain, and during pregnancy.

Bakasana. From a squat with the hands on the mat, the knees rest high on the backs of the upper arms and the body tips forward until the feet lift: the whole body balances on the hands. The elbows bend about 90° and point back; the centre of mass is solved over the hands.

-66°Ankle dorsiflexion
130°Knee flexion
157°Hip flexion
101°Trunk from vertical
43°Arm to trunk
75°Elbow flexion
22Ankle spacing, cm
32Hand spacing, cm
11Knee 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

Triceps
35 pts
Shoulders
29 pts
Forearms and grip
16 pts
Abs and core
6 pts

Effort and your quota

3/10 effort3fatigue 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: 64 push points, 43 arms points, 6 core points.

Prime movers

Triceps, anterior deltoid, serratus anterior, wrist flexors, rectus abdominis and hip flexors (holding the knees up).

What to look for

  • Hands shoulder-width, fingers spread, gaze forward on the mat, not down.
  • Knees high on the backs of the arms; squeeze them in.
  • Shift forward until the feet float, one at a time if you need to; a block under the feet helps.
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.