Roll down
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Wall roll-down

5 reps · beginner

Take care: Roll down only as far as is comfortable with a lower-back disc problem, and come up slowly if you feel light-headed.

Standing with the back against a wall, feet hip-width apart about 20 cm out from it and the knees soft, arms by the sides. The chin drops and the spine peels off the wall from the head down, the knees bending a little more, until the trunk hangs forward with the arms dangling and only the pelvis still touching the wall; then it rolls back up the wall, the head last. The wall takes some of the weight, so there is no balance check.

-11°Ankle dorsiflexion
8°Knee flexion
16°Hip flexion
3°Trunk from vertical
6°Arm to trunk
6°Elbow flexion
20Ankle spacing, cm
51Hand 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
29 pts
Glutes
22 pts
Hamstrings
5 pts

Effort and your quota

5.5/10 effort5.5fatigue per set

5 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: 27 legs points, 64 core points.

Prime movers

Transversus abdominis and rectus abdominis (controlling the curl), spinal erectors (rolling back up), gluteus maximus; hamstrings and back muscles stretched.

What to look for

  • Peel the spine off the wall one vertebra at a time, and press it back on the same way.
  • Keep the sacrum on the wall the whole time.
  • Let the head and arms hang; breathe out as you go down.
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.