The “sit-stand” test, getting up off the floor without using one’s hands, is well-recognized as a good indicator of healthy aging, and predictor of longevity. But what if you can’t do it? Rather than struggling, there are exercises to strengthen the body to be able to do this vital movement.

Step by step

Teresa Shupe has been teaching Pilates professionally full-time for over 25 years, and here’s what she has to offer in the category of safe and effective ways of improving balance and posture while doing the sitting-to-standing movement:

• Squat! Doing squats (especially deep ones) regularly strengthens all the parts necessary to effectively complete this movement. If your knees aren’t up to it at first, do the squats with your back against a wall to start with.
• Roll! On your back, cross your feet as though preparing to stand, and rock-and-roll your body forwards. To start with you can “cheat” and use your fingertips to give a slight extra lift. This exercise builds mobility in the various necessary parts of the body, and also strengthens the core—as well as getting you accustomed to using your bodyweight to move your body forwards.
• Lift! This one’s focusing on that last part, and taking it further. Because it may be difficult to get enough momentum initially, you can practice by holding small weights in your hands, to shift your centre of gravity forwards a bit. Unlike many weights exercises, in this case you’re going to transition to holding less weight rather than more, though.
• Complete! Continue from the above, without weights now; use the blades of your feet to stand. If you need to, use your fingertips to give you a touch more lift and stability, and reduce the fingers that you use until you are using none.

For more on each of these as well as a visual demonstration, enjoy this short video:

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Further reading

For more exercises with a similar approach, check out:

Mobility As A Sporting Pursuit

Take care!

During the day, your brain is simply too busy to encode memories without interfering with normal processing. At night, however…

The filing system

The brain decides which memories to keep based on significance, using sharp brain wave ripples as an internal bookmarking system. Everyday memories fade, while important events are tagged in this manner for consolidation during sleep.

How does it do this? It starts in the hippocampus, which records experiences during wakefulness and replays them repeatedly at high speed during sleep, preparing them for transfer to the neocortex.

How do we know? Uniform Manifold Approximation & Projection (UMAP) for dimension reduction is a tool that condenses 400-dimensional neural activity data into 3D for visualization. Mice navigating a maze showed hippocampal activity encoding location and learning progression; it also showed neural patterns reflecting maze layout and task mastery.

What this means in practical terms: you need to get good sleep if you don’t want to lose your memories!

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

How To Boost Your Memory Immediately (Without Supplements)

Take care!

We don’t usually do this sort of video, but it seems timely before the new year. The exercises shown here are very good, and the small dietary tweak is what makes it work:

The method

Firstly, the small dietary tweak is: abstaining from foods that cause bloating, such as flour and dairy. She does say “брожение” (fermentation), but we don’t really use the word that way in English. On which note: she is Ukrainian and speaking Russian (context: many Ukrainians grew up speaking both languages), so you will need the subtitles on if you don’t understand Russian, but a) it’s worth it b) the subtitles have been put in manually so they’re a respectable translation.

Secondly, spoiler, she loses about 2 inches.

The exercises are:

1. Pelvic swing-thrusts: sit, supporting yourself on your hands with your butt off the floor; raise your pelvis up to a table position, do 30 repetitions.
2. Leg raises in high plank: perform 20 lifts per leg, each to its side.
3. Leg raises (lying on back): do 20 repetitions.
4. V-crunches: perform 30 repetitions.
5. V-twists: lean on hands and do 25 repetitions.

These exercises (all five done daily for the 7 days) are great for core strength, and core muscletone is what keeps your innards in place, rather than letting them drop down (and out).

Thus, there’s only a small amount of actual fat loss going on here (if any), but it slims the waistline by improving muscletone and simultaneously decreasing bloating, which are both good changes.

For more on all of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It

Take care!