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Low lunge

Anjaneyasana

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

Take care: Fold a blanket under the back knee; keep the hands on the blocks with a painful knee or poor balance.

Anjaneyasana, the right foot forward: the right knee bends to about 90° over the ankle and the left knee rests on the mat with the top of the back foot down. From the hands on blocks either side of the front foot, the trunk lifts upright and the arms reach overhead as the hips sink forward, stretching the front of the back hip.

-3°Ankle dorsiflexion
101°Knee flexion
145°Hip flexion
42°Trunk from vertical
35°Arm to trunk
73°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

Quads
29 pts
Glutes
29 pts
Abs and core
22 pts
Shoulders
8 pts

Effort and your quota

6.5/10 effort6.5fatigue 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: 57 legs points, 8 push points, 22 core points.

Prime movers

Iliopsoas and rectus femoris of the back leg (stretched), quadriceps and gluteus maximus of the front leg, core, deltoids (holding the arms up).

What to look for

  • Front knee over the ankle, back knee padded.
  • Lift the chest first, then let the hips sink forward and down.
  • Draw the lower belly in so the lower back doesn’t sag.
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.