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Shoulder stand

Salamba Sarvangasana

hold 30 s · advanced · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Learn it from a teacher, with a folded blanket under the shoulders; skip it with a neck injury, high blood pressure, glaucoma or a heart condition, and during pregnancy.

Salamba Sarvangasana: lying on the back, the legs lift, the hips roll up over the shoulders and the hands come to support the back, elbows on the mat shoulder-width; then the legs straighten up so the body is close to vertical, resting on the shoulders and upper arms, never on the neck. The head stays on the mat facing up; the shoulders are fixed and the trunk turns about them, so every frame is a real position.

-10°Ankle dorsiflexion
3°Knee flexion
90°Hip flexion
90°Trunk from vertical
11°Arm to trunk
8°Elbow flexion
19Ankle spacing, cm
38Hand 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.

Shoulder, per side
12 / 12

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
Quads
29 pts
Glutes
22 pts
Lower back
16 pts
Upper back
12 pts
Triceps
12 pts

Effort and your quota

7.5/10 effort7.5fatigue per set

Hold for 30 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: advanced. One round counts like light conditioning work: 51 legs points, 12 push points, 12 pull points, 12 arms points, 51 core points.

Prime movers

Rectus abdominis, hip flexors and quadriceps (lifting the legs), gluteus maximus, spinal erectors, triceps and posterior deltoid (pressing the arms down); neck and upper back stretched.

What to look for

  • Fold a blanket under the shoulders (not the head) so the neck keeps its curve.
  • Walk the hands up the back and draw the elbows in toward each other.
  • Never turn the head once you are up; look toward the chest.
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.