The test
The one-minute sit-to-stand test
Stand up and sit down as many times as you can in sixty seconds. It measures leg endurance and how your heart and lungs cope with repeated effort, and it is unusually sensitive to getting the protocol wrong.
What you need. A chair 46cm high with no arms, against a wall. A timer. Use the same chair every time you test.
How to do it
Doing it properly
- Sit with your feet parallel and at least hip-width apart, not touching the chair. Let your arms hang loosely at your sides, or rest your hands on your hips.
- Start the timer.
- Stand up fully, then sit down fully, as many times as you can in 60 seconds at your own pace.
- Rest whenever you need to. The clock keeps running.
What counts
A repetition counts when your knees straighten completely at the top and your backside touches the seat at the bottom. Anything incomplete does not count.
What most people get wrong
- Pushing off your thighs or the chair — the arms cannot help at all.
- Not straightening the knees fully.
- Hovering above the seat instead of touching it.
The evidence
What it actually shows
The reference values come from Strassmann and colleagues, who measured 6,926 adults during a Swiss nationwide health promotion campaign between 2010 and 2012 and published percentiles in five-year age bands from 20 to 79.
A repetition counts when your knees straighten completely at the top and your backside touches the seat at the bottom. Anything incomplete does not count, and the arms may not assist at all — they hang loosely or rest on the hips.
You may rest whenever you need to. The clock keeps running, which is the point: the test is what you can do in a minute, not how fast you can go while you are fresh.
The chair is part of the test. The reference values assume a 46 cm seat with no arms; a lower chair makes the test harder and a higher one makes it easier, and either way your percentile is against the wrong distribution. Use the same chair every time you test.
Arms folded across the chest is a different test — the five-repetition chair rise, with a different protocol and different norms. The percentiles here come from the hands-down version, and the two cannot be mixed.
It is a Swiss health-promotion sample. People who turn up to a public fitness campaign are not a random sample of the population, and are probably fitter than one.
Strassmann A, Steurer-Stey C, Dalla Lana K, Zoller M, Turk AJ, Suter P, Puhan MA. Population-based reference values for the 1-min sit-to-stand test. International Journal of Public Health 2013. n=6,926, ages 20–79.
The next step
One test is one test.
This measures one thing. The Evolution Index measures nine, across the three domains that decide how long you stay useful, and reports your weakest rather than your average — a strong heart does not buy you out of a floor you cannot get up from.
Every score is published with the error around it, because a change smaller than the measurement error is not a change.