What 20 Sit-To-Stands Per Day Actually Do To Your Body

Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, arthritis specialist physio, walks us through the changes:

Take a stand

The “sit-to-stand” test, standing from a chair without using your hands (and in various clinical contexts, with parameters such as “how many can be done in one minute?”), is a great indicator of healthy aging and (inversely) mortality risk.

Its benefits are simple, but critically important, including:

• Lower-body strength: we’re sure you guessed this one, as the exercise works your thighs, glutes, hamstrings, calves, core, and muscles around your hips, knees, and back.
• Joint support: stronger muscles can better absorb and manage forces placed on your joints during walking, climbing stairs, and other movements, which in turn reduces joint stress and improves mobility.
• Heart fitness: repeatedly standing and sitting increases cardiovascular demand greatly. Over time, this sort of regular activity strongly supports cardiovascular fitness and makes activities such as climbing stairs (without being out of breath!) and walking longer distances easier.
• Bone strength: sit-to-stands are a weight-bearing movement that places mechanical stress on your bones, providing a signal that can help maintain bone strength as you age. This is very important too, especially as this exercise works exactly the bones that are most likely to get fractured if not kept healthy!
• Fall prevention: standing requires your brain and muscles to coordinate weight shifting, leg force, balance, and stabilization. Thus, it can help develop the strength and coordination needed to respond to trips and stumbles.

Those are perhaps the most important ones, but it has other benefits too; for more benefits (and also for visual demonstrations), enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← our main feature on the perils of being overly sedentary, and also includes more things you can do if you must sit, to make sitting less bad!

Take care!