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Locust

Salabhasana

hold 20 s · beginner · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Lift the legs or the chest one at a time if the lower back strains; skip it with a back injury that bending backward aggravates, and during pregnancy.

Salabhasana: lying face down with the arms long beside the body, palms down. The chest, arms and straight legs all lift together, the chest about 18° and the legs about 12° from the hips, so the body rests on the belly and pelvis; the arms reach back toward the feet and the gaze stays down on the mat ahead.

-80°Ankle dorsiflexion
2°Knee flexion
3°Hip flexion
90°Trunk from vertical
13°Arm to trunk
4°Elbow flexion
26Ankle spacing, cm
59Hand spacing, cm
-2Knee 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

Lower back
35 pts
Glutes
22 pts
Hamstrings
16 pts
Upper back
12 pts

Effort and your quota

5.5/10 effort5.5fatigue per set

Hold for 20 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: 39 legs points, 12 pull points, 35 core points.

Prime movers

Spinal erectors, multifidus, gluteus maximus, hamstrings, lower trapezius, rhomboids, posterior deltoids.

What to look for

  • Reach the legs long behind before lifting them; keep them straight.
  • Lift the chest and arms, reaching the fingertips toward the feet.
  • Neck long: look at the mat a little ahead, not up.
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.