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Side view
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Half splits

Ardha Hanumanasana

hold 30 s each side · beginner · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Keep the front knee soft with a recent hamstring strain, and pad the back knee.

Ardha Hanumanasana, from a low lunge with the right foot forward and the hands on blocks: the hips draw back until they are over the left knee, the front leg straightens with the heel on the mat and the toes pulled back, and the trunk folds forward over it with a long back.

-22°Ankle dorsiflexion
79°Knee flexion
142°Hip flexion
42°Trunk from vertical
37°Arm to trunk
70°Elbow flexion
23Ankle spacing, cm
54Hand spacing, cm
1Knee 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

Lower back
29 pts
Abs and core
16 pts
Quads
11 pts
Hamstrings
11 pts
Calves and shins
11 pts

Effort and your quota

4.5/10 effort4.5fatigue per set

Hold for 30 seconds on each side: 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, 45 core points.

Prime movers

Hamstrings and calf of the front leg (stretched), spinal erectors, quadriceps of the front leg (holding it straight), hip flexors.

What to look for

  • Hips stack over the back knee.
  • Flex the front foot and keep a little bend in the knee if the hamstring pulls sharply.
  • Fold from the hips with a long back; bring the blocks closer rather than rounding.
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.