Lift
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Prone leg lift

8 reps each side · beginner

Take care: Not during pregnancy or after giving birth while lying face down is uncomfortable; lift lower if the lower back pinches.

Lying face down with the forehead on the stacked hands and the legs long and hip-width apart, one straight leg lifts a few centimetres to about 18° from the hip, toes pointed and the hip bones heavy on the mat, then lowers; then the other leg.

-70°Ankle dorsiflexion
2°Knee flexion
6°Hip flexion
84°Trunk from vertical
136°Arm to trunk
126°Elbow flexion
28Ankle spacing, cm
24Hand spacing, cm
-3Knee 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

Glutes
35 pts
Hamstrings
29 pts
Abs and core
16 pts
Lower back
11 pts

Effort and your quota

6/10 effort6fatigue per set

8 slow, controlled reps on each side. Pilates 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: 64 legs points, 27 core points.

Prime movers

Gluteus maximus, hamstrings, spinal erectors and multifidus (keeping the pelvis still), transversus abdominis.

What to look for

  • Lengthen the leg away before you lift it: long, not high.
  • Keep both hip bones pressing into the mat.
  • Draw the belly in as if lifting it off the mat.
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.