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Wide-legged seated forward fold

Upavistha Konasana

hold 60 s · beginner · move in slowly, hold, come out the same way

Take care: Go only as wide as the knees stay pointing up; skip it with a groin or hamstring strain.

Upavistha Konasana, sitting on the edge of a block: the legs open wide (about 100° between them) with the knees and toes pointing up. With the palms on the mat between the legs, the hands walk forward while the trunk folds forward from the hips with a long back, from about 35° to 55°.

6°Ankle dorsiflexion
2°Knee flexion
104°Hip flexion
36°Trunk from vertical
36°Arm to trunk
2°Elbow flexion
149Ankle spacing, cm
44Hand spacing, cm
-33Knee 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
22 pts
Hamstrings
11 pts
Adductors
11 pts
Lower back
9 pts

Effort and your quota

2.5/10 effort2.5fatigue per set

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: 21 legs points, 31 core points.

Prime movers

Adductors and hamstrings (stretched), spinal erectors (stretched), hip flexors.

What to look for

  • Sit on the edge of the block so the pelvis can tip forward.
  • Keep the kneecaps and toes pointing up, not rolling in.
  • Walk the hands forward only as far as the back stays long.
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.