A Number Between Zero and Ten

My buddy Rich dropped his car keys at a cookout last summer.

Not a big deal. Keys hit the patio, bounced under a chair. What happened next is the part I can’t shake.

He looked at those keys like they’d fallen into a well. Grabbed the arm of the chair. Lowered himself down in stages. Got the keys. Then needed both hands on the chair to pull himself back up. The whole thing took about thirty seconds.

Rich is 61. Plays golf twice a week. Looks fine from the outside.

But watching him fight his way off the ground told me something no blood test ever would.

A few weeks later, I came across a test that put a number on exactly what I saw.

It’s called the Sitting-Rising Test. A doctor in Rio de Janeiro named Claudio Gil Araújo built it. He runs an exercise medicine clinic called CLINIMEX and has been studying how people move for decades. The test itself is dead simple.

You stand barefoot on a flat surface. Cross your legs. Lower yourself to a seated position on the floor without using your hands, knees, or arms. Then you stand back up the same way.

No time limit. No equipment. Just you and the ground.

You start with 5 points for sitting down and 5 for standing up. Every time you use a hand, a knee, or an arm for help, you lose one point. If you wobble or look unsteady, you lose half a point.

Perfect score is a 10. The whole thing takes less than two minutes.

Araújo first published this research in 2012. He tested 2,002 adults between the ages of 51 and 80, then followed them for more than six years. During that window, 159 of them died.

The people who scored 0 to 3 had a five-to-six-times higher risk of dying than those who scored 8 to 10. Not twice the risk. Five to six times.

Let that sit for a second.

Then in June 2025, Araújo published a bigger follow-up in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. This time, 4,282 people took the test. Average age was 59. Researchers followed them for more than twelve years.

The results were even sharper.

A perfect score of 10 meant a 3.7 percent death rate over those twelve years. A score of 0 to 4? That number jumped to 42.1 percent. People who scored in the lowest group had 3.8 times the risk of dying from natural causes—and six times the risk of dying from heart disease.

This isn’t a treadmill test. It doesn’t measure your aerobic capacity or your lung function. It measures whether your body can still do what a body is supposed to do. Bend. Balance. Push. Stand.

And right now, your doctor probably isn’t checking any of it.

Here’s how to do it. Go barefoot. Wear something loose. Have someone nearby in case you lose your balance.

Stand with your feet roughly shoulder-width apart. Cross one leg over the other. Slowly lower yourself to a seated position on the floor. Try not to use your hands, your knees, or your forearms.

Then reverse it. Stand back up without grabbing anything for support.

Don’t rush. There’s no clock on this.

Score yourself honestly. One support used means you lose one point. One wobble means you lose half a point. Add your sitting score to your standing score. That’s your number.

If you score 8 or above, you’re in solid shape. Below 8, keep reading.

I wouldn’t panic. I’d get to work.

The test measures four things: leg strength, core stability, balance, and hip mobility. So those are the four things you train. None of it requires a gym membership or a personal trainer. Here’s what works.

▸ Squats. Bodyweight or goblet style, 3 sets of 10. If you can’t squat below parallel, start with chair squats—lower yourself to a chair and stand back up without your hands. Do them every day.
▸ Lunges. Walking or reverse, 2 sets of 8 per leg. These build the single-leg strength you actually need when pushing yourself off the floor.
▸ Single-leg stands. Hold for 30 seconds on each side. When that gets easy, close your eyes. This is real balance work, and it transfers directly to the test.
▸ Floor sitting. Five minutes a day, cross-legged on the ground. Just being down there helps. Your hips tighten up when you stop using them through their full range.

You don’t need a gym. You don’t need a trainer. You need fifteen minutes a day and a floor.

Your annual physical checks blood pressure, heart rate, weight, and maybe cholesterol. Those are important numbers. But they miss something big.

They don’t test whether you can get down to the ground and back up. Whether you can catch yourself if you trip on a curb. Whether your body still moves the way it’s supposed to.

Falls are the leading cause of injury death among older adults, and most of them happen because someone lost their balance or couldn’t recover from a stumble. The sitting-rising test checks exactly those abilities—strength, balance, flexibility, and coordination.

And here’s the part that should give you hope. You can improve your score. Araújo has said his team has worked with people well into their 90s who raised their numbers. The score isn’t carved in stone. It’s trainable.

I saw Rich again last month. Told him about the test over a beer. He went home and tried it in his garage.

Scored a 4.

He didn’t say much that night. But the next week he texted me a photo of a yoga mat he’d bought at Target. Said he’d been doing squats and floor sits every morning before coffee.

That’s the whole point. The number isn’t a verdict. It’s a starting line. And the work isn’t complicated. It’s just showing up.

Rich will score higher next time. Not because he read an article. Because he got on the floor and did something about it.

The best thing you can do this week takes ten seconds. Get on the floor. And get back up.

— Walter