This study presents a new approach to classify human body poses by using angular constraints and variations of body joints. Although different classifications of the poses have been previously made, the proposed approach attempts to create a more comprehensive, accurate and extensible classification by integrating all possible poses based on angles of movement in human joints. The angular variations in all body joints can determine any possible poses. The joint angles from the body axis are computed in the three-dimensional space. In order to train and classify the pose in an automated manner, support vector machines (SVMs) were used. Experiments were carried out on both benchmark (CMU dataset) and in-house simulated (POSER dataset) poses to evaluate the performance of the proposed classification scheme.