Sit, stand, live — but walk

When you get a couple minutes of free time — and nobody's looking — try this simple exercise: In socks or bare feet, stand in the middle of a room with your legs crossed. Without using your hands, arms or knees as aids, sit down, then stand up again.

This test only (officially) applies to people aged 51 and up, but if you can do this smoothly and without losing balance, congratulations. Live long and prosper.

Picture taken from Discover's web site. Give yourself 5 points
 if you can sit like the illustration, and 5 more if you can stand
again. Deduct half points for wobbles or loss of balance.
Deduct a full point for each touch of the ground for support.
A score of 8 or less doubles your risk of dying in the next
6 years. A score of 3 or less suggests you are 5 time more likely
 to die in 6 years than people who can do this well.

If you need to touch the ground to sit and/or rise again, you apparently have double the risk of dying within the next six years, compared to your more nimble neighbours. Total failure raises your risk by a factor of five.

Which is to say that, all other factors considered, your risk of imminent death is still slight. But numbers are numbers, especially to people publishing studies in medical journals.

The December issue of Discover magazine, both in print and online got a lot of attention in our attention-deficit age — and a lot of criticism, showing that no matter how connected we are by technology, actual science is still a mystery to many.

Some years ago a Brazilian doctor, Claudio Gil Araujo, was concerned that his aging patients could not comfortably pick something up off the floor, or even had difficulty rising from a chair. It is well documented in medicine: when seniors lose mobility, their downward spiral accelerates.

But how to make this predictable, and how to make it easy to explain to older patients that they must work on flexibility, strength and balance?

The above test became his answer. Dr. Araujo followed 2,000 patients, recorded how they could do the test, and tracked how many of them had died six years later. His results were published in the European Journal of Cardiology. Not quite The Lancet, but the study is out there.

Science writers like those at Discover found the study and made it popular. People like us in the news media made it viral.

And people who don't understand science (including some news types) went off the deep end.

People who cannot do the sit-stand test are not under a sentence of death. (Hint: we all are.) This study merely a recorded correlation between flexibility, strength and balance, and longevity.

People who were athletes with injured knees made snarky online comments about supposedly being dead. Same for people with arthritis. Runners, those paragons of health and virtue, apparently also get weak knees in the face of statistics.

People, the test was never meant to predict your death. It was made to urge you to embrace life.

All of us simply spend too much time sitting on our butts. Humans did not evolve to do this successfully. We need to move, to sweat, even to hurt a little, if we wish to have the best chance of reaching the fullness of our years.

If you had trouble with the sit-stand test — or even if it was easy for you — it's important to remind ourselves that we have to move a lot, every day.

For a few years now, the Red Deer Primary Care network has sponsored an activity challenge. Participants went on virtual hikes around Jamaica and Hawaii, and mostly recently, up Mount Everest.

The University of Alberta recently got a provincial grant to sponsor a similar challenge for the entire province, and Red Deer PCN is in the thick of it.

They want a minimum of 1,000 Red Deerians to challenge themselves to record activity online, equal to walking 10,000 steps a day, as a team. The goal is to collectively walk the equivalent of a Canadian border patrol in 28 days, beginning Feb. 1.

People who have done PCN treks in the past probably still have their StepsOut link on their Favourites bar. Click on that, and you'll see the link to www.uwalk.ca.

Newbies can just type in the address, and get registered. I still haven't figured out how to get my registration onto the Red Deer team, but that will come.

I've participated in all the local PCN treks over the years, and I'll miss not having my team trying to outrun those dratted school district teachers teams. (They far too often managed to stay a day ahead of us.)

But it will be cool to see people from Red Deer putting in enough activity that, added together, made up a trip along our national border, coast-to-coast-to-coast.

The older we get, the more important it becomes; we need to stay active in all ways: walking, running, biking, swimming — even using the stairs (10 flights of 10 steps a day, that's your goal).

Do the sit-stand test, it's fun. But more important, clip on a pedometer, and make sure 10,000 steps a day (or equivalent in other activity) is your daily minimum.

That's a far better guarantor of health and well-being.