Standing up off the floor predicts how long someone lives

Researchers in Brazil, working with a Stanford researcher, scored more than 2,000 adults aged 51 to 80 on how well they could complete that single movement, then tracked who among them died over the next several years.

People who could not perform the sitting-rising test without support were far more likely to die over a median follow-up of 6.3 years than those who completed it easily, and each one-point improvement in the test's simple scoring scale was linked to a 21 percent lower risk of death from any cause.

The test takes under a minute, needs no equipment, and appeared to capture a mix of strength, balance, and flexibility that routine checkups usually miss. It has not replaced established risk tools in most clinics, and the original study's size, while larger than many fitness studies, is still modest next to the big cohort studies that established blood pressure or cholesterol as risk markers.

A thirty-second floor test that tracked years of life.