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Parsva Balasana

hold 30 s each side · beginner · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Rest the head on a block if the neck strains, keep the twist small with a shoulder injury, and pad the knees.

Parsva Balasana, from hands and knees: the hips stay over the knees while the right arm slides under the left arm, palm up, along the mat to the left, until the right shoulder and the side of the head rest on the mat. The chest turns about 70° toward the left; the left hand stays planted ahead with its elbow bent.

-78°Ankle dorsiflexion
90°Knee flexion
78°Hip flexion
78°Trunk from vertical
67°Arm to trunk
26°Elbow flexion
20Ankle spacing, cm
40Hand 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
1 / 11

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

Upper back
35 pts
Abs and core
16 pts

Effort and your quota

2.5/10 effort2.5fatigue per set

Hold for 30 seconds on each side: 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: 35 pull points, 16 core points.

Prime movers

Rhomboids, posterior deltoid and trapezius of the threaded arm (stretched), thoracic rotators and obliques (stretched), external obliques.

What to look for

  • Keep the hips over the knees; don’t let them drift to the side.
  • Slide the arm all the way through until the shoulder rests on the mat.
  • Press the top hand down to turn the chest a little further.
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.