Kapotasana
hold 10 s · advanced · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way
Take care: Only for a practice already deep in camel and wheel, warmed up and with a teacher; skip it with a lower-back, neck or knee injury, high blood pressure or a heart condition, and during pregnancy.
Kapotasana, the kneeling king pigeon: from camel, with the knees hip-width and the tops of the feet down, the hips press far forward of the knees while the spine arches back all the way, until the crown of the head comes down to the mat just in front of the feet and the hands take hold of the feet, elbows bent out to the sides; the full expression walks the hands on to the heels with the forearms flat. One of the deepest back-bends taught: the pelvis and spine angles are prescribed and the neck extends just enough to set the head down.
Bodyweight: no weights. Joint demand below is your own body's weight in this position.
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.
Femur changes keep standing height fixed by shortening or lengthening the torso. Longer femurs force more forward lean in any squat.
Hold for 10 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: advanced. One round counts like light conditioning work: 63 legs points, 32 push points, 4 pull points, 16 arms points, 47 core points.
Spinal erectors, gluteus maximus, hamstrings, triceps; quadriceps, hip flexors, abdominals, pectoralis major, latissimus dorsi and anterior deltoid stretched.
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.