Roll back
Side view
Drag to orbit, pinch or scroll to zoom

Open leg rocker

6 reps · intermediate

Take care: Roll on a padded mat; skip it with a neck or back injury or osteoporosis, and during pregnancy.

Balanced just behind the sit bones in a V, the straight legs open about shoulder-width and the hands holding the ankles, the back rounds and the body rocks back onto the shoulder blades and up again to the balance, keeping the same V shape. Modelled as a rigid, rounded body rocking on its back; at the balance the centre of mass is over the contact.

-25°Ankle dorsiflexion
3°Knee flexion
133°Hip flexion
20°Trunk from vertical
73°Arm to trunk
58°Elbow flexion
74Ankle spacing, cm
86Hand spacing, cm
-15Knee 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
11 / 11

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

Abs and core
35 pts
Lower back
12 pts
Hamstrings
4 pts

Effort and your quota

2.5/10 effort2.5fatigue per set

6 slow, controlled reps. Pilates 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: 4 legs points, 47 core points.

Prime movers

Rectus abdominis, transversus abdominis, obliques, hip flexors (holding the V); hamstrings stretched; spinal erectors massaged.

What to look for

  • Keep the shape: the distance between the hands and the hips never changes.
  • Roll onto the shoulder blades, never the neck; scoop the belly to come back up.
  • Hold the calves instead of the ankles, or bend the knees a little, if the hamstrings are tight.
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.