CircleBalanced over midfoot
Side view
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Standing leg circles

5 reps each side · beginner

Take care: Stand beside a wall or chair if your balance is unsteady.

Standing tall on the left leg, arms out to the sides for balance. The right leg, straight with the toes pointed and lifted a little forward off the floor, draws circles about 25 cm across with the foot, moving from the hip: out to the side, up, across and down, then the other way. The pelvis stays level and still; the centre of mass is solved over the standing foot.

-30°Ankle dorsiflexion
3°Knee flexion
22°Hip flexion
0°Trunk from vertical
80°Arm to trunk
8°Elbow flexion
11Ankle spacing, cm
166Hand spacing, cm
-2Knee 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.

Knee extensors
21 / 38
Calves
53 / 53
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

Glutes
35 pts
Abs and core
29 pts
Adductors
22 pts

Effort and your quota

5.5/10 effort5.5fatigue per set

5 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: 57 legs points, 29 core points.

Prime movers

Gluteus medius and minimus of the standing leg, hip flexors, adductors and abductors of the circling leg, deep hip rotators, transversus abdominis, foot and ankle stabilisers.

What to look for

  • Stand tall through the standing leg; do not sink into the hip.
  • Make the circle only as big as you can keep the pelvis still.
  • A hand on a wall or chair is fine.
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.