The Sitting-Rising Test

The Sitting‑Rising Test: A Handy Tool, Not a Crystal Ball

Every few months, a fitness test goes viral. One month it's grip strength. The next it's balancing on one leg. Then someone decides the secret to a long life is putting your shoes on while standing up.

The latest test making the rounds is the sitting-rising test (SRT), a deceptively simple challenge: sit on the floor, then stand back up and see how many points you lose along the way.

You start with 5 points for sitting and 5 points for rising. Points are deducted whenever you use a hand, knee, forearm, or other support. A half-point is deducted for unsteadiness. So if you sit down and stand back up without touching anything, you score a perfect 10. Use one hand getting up and your score drops to 9. Use one hand sitting and one hand rising and you're down to 8.

You can see a nice graphic here that illustrates the scoring system.

A perfect score of 10 is surprisingly difficult to achieve.

So what happened when I tried it?

I gave it a few attempts. The first was under conditions similar to those used in the study: indoors on a yoga mat. I got down just fine but couldn't get back up without using one hand, giving me a score of 9.

Then I tried it outside on the grass. To my surprise, I managed to get back up without using my hand, although there may have been a little wobbling involved. Let's call it a 9.5 or maybe even a 10.

Unfortunately, I couldn't repeat the feat. The next attempt required a hand again.

Interestingly, I think the test may actually have been easier on the grass. I'm not sure why. Maybe the uneven surface or the slightly squishy ground made it easier to shift my weight.

The test was developed in the late 1990s by Dr. Claudio Gil Soares de Araújo, a highly respected researcher and physician in exercise medicine. The goal was to create a quick, simple way to assess physical function that required no equipment and could be performed almost anywhere.

What makes the sitting-rising test particularly interesting is that it evaluates general functional fitness rather than cardiovascular fitness. Strength, mobility, balance, coordination, and flexibility all contribute to the score.

A landmark study published in 2012 examined the relationship between SRT scores and all-cause mortality (i.e. death from any cause). At the time, aerobic fitness got most of the attention. The sitting-rising test was a reminder that healthy aging is about more than how fast you can walk on a treadmill.

In the original study, participants were grouped by scores of 8-10, 6-7.5, 3.5-5.5, and 0-3. Unsurprisingly, the highest-scoring participants fared better than the lowest-scoring participants. What was striking was just how large the difference was.

It showed that people with very low scores tended to have higher mortality risk over time — which makes sense. If you struggle to get off the floor, you probably struggle with other daily movements too. This study suggested that strength, balance, mobility, and flexibility are important for healthy aging.

Recently (July 2026) this same research group published a new study basically showed a similar outcome.  This was a larger study which followed people for longer than the original.

My main quibble with the newer paper is that the scoring categories changed. Instead of the original groupings, participants were divided into scores of 10 alone, 8.5-9.5, 8 alone, 4.5-7.5, and 0-4. People who would have been grouped together in the original study were now split across several different categories, while the highest-performing group was subdivided into three separate groups

I understand what the authors were trying to do. A larger cohort may allow finer distinctions to emerge. Still, I wish they had also presented an analysis using the original categories so comparisons between studies would have been more straightforward. 

Furthermore, in my opinion, and this is just my back-seat retired statistician opinion, the authors should have dug more deeply into age. I won't bore you with all the details, but I don't like how it was handled in their model.

The paper reports that the mean age of survivors was 58, compared with 65 for non-survivors. That's a meaningful difference. Someone who is 75 at the beginning of the study and followed for 12 years is in a very different situation than someone who starts off at 46.

If I had been the statistician on this paper, I would have gone a lot farther down this road. It's barely discussed in the paper, which surprised me given how important age appears to be in the results.

Where I really think things go off the rails, however, is in the way these findings are communicated to the public.

Harvard Health recently discussed the sitting-rising test in one of its newsletters. Somewhere between the journal article and the newsletter, much of the nuance got lost. Suddenly the takeaway seemed to be: If you can't pop off the floor like a gymnast, worry.

To be fair to Harvard, I'm sure that wasn't their intent. But that's what I heard when I read it.

Here's the thing: the sitting-rising test is a tool, not a prophecy. It's a snapshot, not a verdict. It measures one aspect of physical function at one moment in time. That's useful information, but it isn't a report card on your future.

One thing we still don't know is whether specifically improving your SRT score improves longevity. The researchers themselves have suggested this as an area for future study. My guess is that it probably would help, but perhaps not because of the score itself. Strength training, balance work, mobility exercises, and maybe even a little yoga are all likely to improve your score, and they're also things that generally contribute to better health and function. That's speculation on my part, though.

If you'd like to improve your score, great. Practice getting up and down off the floor. Build leg strength. Work on balance and mobility.

Just don't let a single test convince you that you're failing at aging.

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