Well, I can't do this, either up or down. I'm going to live to 94, so there. I could have done this pre-stroke, so another failure on my doctors part of getting me to 100% recovery.
This anxiety-inducing fitness test purports to tell you how long you’ll live. We investigated.
It
seems a simple enough challenge: Sit down on the floor and get back up
without the help of your hands or knees. Try it, though, and you might
discover it’s not as easy as it sounds.
This “sitting-rising” exercise was
designed to predict mortality in middle-aged and older people. The test
was devised by a team led by Claudio Gil Araújo, a Brazilian physician
and researcher in exercise and sports medicine, and published in the
European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention in 2012. It resurfaces
periodically in media outlets or online, causing widespread alarm
regarding mortality among the many people (of all ages) who can’t seem
to get themselves off the ground. We decided to find out whether that
worry is warranted.
How to do it
The
test requires you to lower yourself to the floor, crisscross style,
without bracing yourself with your hands, knees, arms, or sides of your
legs. If you can stand back up, again without the aid of those body
parts, you’ve scored a perfect 10 (five points for sitting, five points
for standing). You lose a point every time you support yourself with a
forbidden joint or appendage.
The
researchers tested 2,002 adults 51 to 80 years old, and then followed
them until a participant died or until the study concluded, which was a
median of 6.3 years. In that time, 159 people died — only two of whom
had scored a perfect 10. Those who had the lowest score of zero to three
points had a risk of death that was five to six times higher than those
who scored eight to 10 points.
“It is well
known that aerobic fitness is strongly related to survival, but our
study also shows that maintaining high levels of body flexibility,
muscle strength, power-to-body weight ratio and co-ordination are not
only good for performing daily activities, but have a favorable
influence on life expectancy,” Araújo said in a 2012 news release.
Sure,
the test is a good measure of leg and core strength, as well as
balance. Older adults who have such muscular strength and flexibility
are less likely to fall. And falls are the leading cause of
unintentional-injury-related deaths for people ages 65 and older,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But
what if you can’t do it? Are you doomed? Should you plan for an early
demise? If so, a test of about a dozen 35 to 40-something friends at a
recent dinner party revealed that more than half of us should probably
get our affairs in order, pronto.
Luckily, a
few more variables apply to our health (and our longevity) than those
this particular test focuses on. It’s important to remember that the
study results are most relevant to those the same age as the subjects in
the testing group, who were ages 51 and up — a point often lost in
discussion. Most of the people who scored the lowest on the test were in
the 76-to-80 age range, a group that generally experiences decreased
mobility and coordination. The research also didn’t reveal the causes of
the 159 deaths during the follow-up period. Should we assume they all
died of complications from falling, instead of cardiovascular disease or
cancer? We don’t know.
It's not completely bogus
The
exercise serves as one method of screening an individual’s loss of
muscle in the aging process, known as sarcopenia, said Greg Hartley,
president of the Academy of Geriatric Physical Therapy and assistant
professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. That
decline leads to other mobility problems, which decreases quality of
life, he said.
“Frailty,
strength, muscle mass, physical performance — those things are all
correlated to mortality, but I would caution everybody that correlation
doesn’t mean causation,” Hartley said. “For example, if somebody had a
really bad knee and there’s no way they could do the test, just because
that person has a really bad knee doesn’t mean they’re going to die
soon.”
Barbara Resnick, professor and chair of
gerontology at the University of Maryland, said the ability to get off
the floor is valuable but “it’s really pretty hard for anybody” if
you’re not using your hands. Failure may be because of something as
simple as where you carry your weight, she said. If you have a thicker
midsection, getting off the floor might be challenging. But unless body
composition is a sign of other health problems, such as obesity, you’re
probably not going to die of it.
“[A high
score] is a sign that at that point in time, you’re in pretty good
physical condition in terms of muscle strength, but I do not believe
it’s a predictor of longevity,” Resnick said. “There’s a genetic
component. Some people are just stronger physiologically and more
coordinated than others.”
If
you’re sitting on the floor worried because you can’t get up, the good
news is that barring complications such as arthritis or vestibular
(inner ear) problems, you can work on it, and you’ll likely improve over
time.
“You can practice every day — teaching
to the test, in other words,” Resnick said. “Resilience is also part of
it. Are you going to keep trying or are you going to just going say,
‘The heck with it’?”
Other tests reveal more
Physicians have many other screening tools at their disposal to measure health and longevity, Hartley said.
For example, a study
published in the February 2019 Journal of the American Medical
Association Network Open, measured the health data and push-up capacity
of 1,104 middle-aged, active male firefighters over the span of 10
years. The men who could complete 40 push-ups during the 10 years had a
96 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those who could do
fewer than 10 push-ups.(I can do zero pushups now.)
Walking speed also has been shown to provide insight to life span. One 2011 study
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded
that people ages 65 and older who could walk one meter per second or
faster lived longer than those who couldn’t.(I can do this, but it is accomplished by leg swinging , hip hiking and some knee snapping.) Another study
that appeared in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that
walking at a faster than average pace reduced risk of death from
cardiovascular disease by 53 percent for all people 60 and older.
“If
you can walk at your natural pace at two miles per hour or faster(I do 5 miles in 2 hours on a trail in the woods.),
you’re a lot less likely to die in the next 10 years,” Hartley said.
“Walking speed is highly correlated to mortality.”
Doctors
also sometimes use a hand dynamometer to assess grip strength and can
learn a lot about our death risk from it. One study showed that each
11-pound decrease in grip strength is linked to a 16 percent higher risk
of dying from any cause, including heart disease, stroke and heart
attack.
“It’s
how hard you can squeeze the dynamometer,” Hartley said. “It’s another
marker of frailty. The biggest impact on grip strength has to do with
how fit you were in young adult and middle-adult life. So, there’s a
preventive aspect to this.”
Bottom line? Get moving.
Once
you’ve peeled yourself off the ground following the sit-rise test, use
your newfound sense of defeat to get stronger and improve your fitness.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently released new guidelines for
physical activity, suggesting that adults 65 and older break their 150
to 300 minutes of exercise each week into short bouts of activities that
focus on balance, aerobic exercise and muscle strengthening.
The key is to find forms of exercise you enjoy — or find purpose in doing what you may not like to do.
“If
I tell a patient to exercise because it’s going to improve
cardiovascular health, it doesn’t motivate them,” Hartley said. “What
motivates them is the ability to go to a grandchild’s kindergarten
graduation. What do you really care about? What do you want to be able
to do?”
It’s also never too early or too late
in life to start or increase physical activity — it’s beneficial and
increases life expectancy no matter when you do it. Aim for 30 minutes
of moderate exercise a day, Resnick said.
“I always say my patients walk to heaven — that’s my goal,” she said.
Erin Strout is a freelance journalist and digital editor of Women’s
Running. Her work also appears in Runner’s World and Outside. Follower
her on twitter: @erinstrout.
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