Paschimottanasana
hold 60 s · beginner · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way
Take care: Bend the knees and fold only a little with a lower-back disc problem or sciatica; skip it with a hamstring tear.
Paschimottanasana with a strap: sitting with the legs straight and together, feet flexed, a strap looped round the balls of the feet and held in both hands. The trunk folds forward from the hips about 55° with a long back, the hands walking up the strap and the elbows bending out.
Bodyweight: no weights. Joint demand below is your own body's weight in this position.
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.
Femur changes keep standing height fixed by shortening or lengthening the torso. Longer femurs force more forward lean in any squat.
Hold for 60 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: 25 legs points, 25 core points.
Hamstrings and calves (stretched), spinal erectors (stretched), gluteus maximus (stretched), hip flexors.
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.