Move into the pose
Side view
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Legs up the wall

Viparita Karani

hold 180 s · beginner · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Skip long holds with uncontrolled high blood pressure, glaucoma or a heart condition, as the legs are held above the heart.

Viparita Karani: lying on the back with the seat close to a wall, the legs rest straight up it, the backs of the legs and the heels against the wall, arms out to the sides, palms up. The demonstration slides the heels up the wall from bent knees.

-5°Ankle dorsiflexion
85°Knee flexion
135°Hip flexion
90°Trunk from vertical
43°Arm to trunk
16°Elbow flexion
21Ankle spacing, cm
113Hand 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.

Shoulder, per side
12 / 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

Hamstrings
11 pts
Calves and shins
9 pts

Effort and your quota

1.5/10 effort1.5fatigue per set

Hold for 180 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: beginner. One round counts like light conditioning work: 17 legs points.

Prime movers

Hamstrings (stretched), calves (stretched).

What to look for

  • Get the seat as close to the wall as the hamstrings allow; move away if the knees won’t straighten.
  • Let the legs rest against the wall, feet relaxed.
  • Come out by bending the knees and rolling to the side.
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.