Roll back
Side view
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Rolling like a ball

8 reps · beginner

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

Sitting balanced just behind the sit bones in a tight ball, knees pulled in, heels close to the seat and hands holding the shins, the body rolls back onto the shoulder blades and up again without losing its shape. Modelled as a rigid, rounded body rolling on its back without slipping.

-30°Ankle dorsiflexion
152°Knee flexion
131°Hip flexion
44°Trunk from vertical
39°Arm to trunk
103°Elbow flexion
29Ankle spacing, cm
44Hand spacing, cm
0Knee 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

Abs and core
35 pts
Lower back
5 pts

Effort and your quota

2/10 effort2fatigue per set

8 slow, controlled reps. 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: 40 core points.

Prime movers

Rectus abdominis, transversus abdominis, obliques (holding the shape); spinal erectors massaged and stretched.

What to look for

  • Keep the same shape the whole way: chin in, heels close to the seat.
  • Roll onto the shoulder blades, never onto the neck.
  • Use the breath: in to roll back, out to come up and balance.
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.