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Lizard

Utthan Pristhasana

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

Take care: Pad the back knee and keep the hands on the blocks with a stiff hip or a sore knee; skip it with a groin strain.

Utthan Pristhasana with the back knee down: from a low lunge the right foot steps out toward the edge of the mat, toes turned out a little, and both hands rest on blocks inside the front foot. The hips sink forward and down and the elbows bend until the forearms rest on the blocks, the chest long and low.

-9°Ankle dorsiflexion
104°Knee flexion
132°Hip flexion
46°Trunk from vertical
38°Arm to trunk
43°Elbow flexion
36Ankle spacing, cm
41Hand spacing, cm
4Knee 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

Quads
22 pts
Adductors
11 pts
Abs and core
11 pts
Hamstrings
9 pts
Glutes
9 pts
Shoulders
8 pts
Triceps
8 pts

Effort and your quota

5/10 effort5fatigue 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: intermediate. One round counts like light conditioning work: 50 legs points, 16 push points, 8 arms points, 11 core points.

Prime movers

Adductors and hip flexors (stretched), gluteus maximus and hamstrings of the front leg (stretched), quadriceps, deltoids and triceps (holding the chest).

What to look for

  • Front knee tracks over the toes; let it open a little to the side.
  • Stay on the hands if the forearms make the hips lift or the back round.
  • Lengthen the chest forward rather than collapsing between the shoulders.
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.