Can You Get Off the Floor Without Using Your Hands?

It sounds like a party trick. It isn’t.

Researchers have been tracking a simple test for years: sit down on the floor, then stand back up, using as little help from your hands and knees as possible. You start with 10 points and lose one every time you need a hand, a knee, or a wobble to get there.

In a study of more than 4,000 adults between 46 and 75, followed for a median of about 12 years, 3.7% of the people who scored a perfect 10 died of natural causes. Among those who scored 0 to 4, 42.1% did.

That’s not a stretching statistic. That’s a life statistic.

And here’s the part most people miss: the test doesn’t just measure how flexible you are. It measures whether you actually use what you have.

Why This Matters More at 40+

Here’s the shift most people don’t see coming: before 40, mobility mostly takes care of itself. You move, you stay loose, you don’t think about it. After 40, the qualities that used to come free — range of motion, balance, the ability to get down and back up — start requiring deliberate attention.

Flexibility isn’t just about touching your toes. A study of more than 3,000 middle-aged adults scored body flexibility across 20 movements in seven joints and followed them for an average of about 13 years. Lower flexibility scores predicted worse survival. Researchers think part of the reason is that stiff bodies often come with stiff arteries, and poor balance sets up the falls that start a much steeper decline.

But range of motion is only half the equation. Range of motion is your capacity. Daily movement is how you spend it. A joint that can move and doesn’t is on its way to being a joint that can’t.

Your Step Count Is Doing More Than You Think

This is the number we’d most like you to pay attention to, because it’s the one almost nobody tracks and almost everybody could change this week.

Researchers followed roughly 4,800 U.S. adults aged 40 and over who wore accelerometers, then tracked mortality for about a decade. Compared with 4,000 steps a day, 8,000 steps a day was associated with a 51% lower risk of death from all causes. Twelve thousand steps was associated with a 65% lower risk.

Two things about that finding deserve your attention.

First, intensity didn’t matter — volume did. After accounting for total daily steps, how fast those steps were taken showed no additional association with mortality risk. You do not have to power-walk. You have to walk.

Second, the target is lower than the number in your head. A meta-analysis pooling 15 international cohorts — about 47,000 adults — found that mortality risk plateaus around 6,000 to 8,000 steps per day for adults 60 and older, and around 8,000 to 10,000 for adults under 60. Ten thousand was a marketing number from a 1960s Japanese pedometer campaign, not a research finding. If you’re sitting at 3,000 and you get to 7,000, you have captured most of the available benefit.

The Hours You’re Not Training

There’s a term for all the movement that isn’t exercise: NEAT, or non-exercise activity thermogenesis. It’s everything you do that isn’t sleeping, eating, or working out — walking to the car, taking the stairs, standing while you’re on the phone, carrying groceries in two trips instead of one.

For most people, NEAT accounts for far more daily energy expenditure than their actual workouts do. Research from Mayo Clinic found that sedentary adults with obesity tended to sit roughly two to two and a half hours more per day than their leaner but equally non-exercising counterparts — a difference worth about 350 calories a day, with no gym time involved at all.

We bring this up because of a pattern we see constantly: someone trains hard with us three times a week and then sits for eleven hours a day, and can’t understand why body composition won’t move. Three hours of training cannot outvote 100 hours of sitting. The good news is that NEAT is the single most modifiable piece of your daily energy expenditure. You don’t need permission or a program to change it.

And there’s a direct line back to where we started. Every time you get up off the couch, take the stairs, or squat down to the bottom shelf, you are rehearsing the sit-to-rise test in real life. Movement is how mobility stays yours.

What To Do This Week

• Take the test. Sit down to the floor and stand back up. Count what you needed. Write the number down — that’s your baseline, and we’ll retest it.
• Find your real step number. Don’t set a goal yet. Just look at what your phone or watch already says for the last seven days. Most people are surprised, in one direction or the other.
• Add 1,500 steps to that number. Not 10,000. Your current average plus about 1,500 — roughly a 12-minute walk. Hold it for two weeks, then add again. That’s how step counts actually stick.
• Break up the sitting. Stand or walk for two minutes every hour you’re at a desk. Set the timer; you won’t remember on your own.
• Pick two flexibility days. Thirty to sixty seconds per hold, hitting hips, hamstrings, thoracic spine, and ankles.
• Get up and down off the floor on purpose, once a day. It’s the most underrated movement pattern in adult life.
• Add load to your range. Whatever new range you open up, train it. A stretch you can’t control isn’t yours yet.

Come See Where You’re Starting From

If you don’t know your baseline, you’re guessing. We’d love to change that.

Book a stretch therapy session at Milford or Middletown and we’ll assess where your movement is actually restricted — not where you think it is. Or come in for an InBody scan and a consult so we can look at body composition, daily movement, and mobility together, as the one connected picture they actually are.

Your journey doesn’t need a perfect starting point. It needs a real one.

Let us know if you have any questions — we’re here to support you.

Sources

1. Araujo et al. Sitting–rising test scores predict natural and cardiovascular causes of death in middle-aged and older men and women. European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, 2025. Link
2. Saint-Maurice et al. Association of Daily Step Count and Step Intensity With Mortality Among US Adults. JAMA, March 24, 2020. Link
3. Paluch et al. Daily steps and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts. The Lancet Public Health, March 2022. Link
4. Araujo et al. Reduced Body Flexibility Is Associated With Poor Survival in Middle-Aged Men and Women. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 2024. Link
5. Levine et al. Interindividual Variation in Posture Allocation: Possible Role in Human Obesity. Science, 2005. Link
6. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis in Human Energy Homeostasis. Endotext / NCBI Bookshelf. Link
7. Feland et al. The effect of duration of stretching of the hamstring muscle group for increasing range of motion in people aged 65 years or older. Physical Therapy, 2001. Link
8. How much and how often should people stretch? American Heart Association, 2024. Link