Take this Test NOW: Sitting – Rising Test.

No time for exercise? Too busy to eat right? What kind of a toll is it all taking on your health?

There’s a simple test you can do just about anywhere that’s been proven to predict how long you’ll live. A doctor in Brazil invented the Sitting and Rising Test or SRT, and he’s proven it can predict your risk of dying in the next five years

Sit. Stand. Repeat.

This little trick — a deceptively simple measure of flexibility and strength — can predict who will live longer and whose lives will be cut short. A Brazilian physician uses the test with athletes, but he also uses it to lay out the stakes with patients: To live longer, they must get moving and maintain muscle and balance.

Many patients, particularly older people, have trouble with ordinary motions such as bending down to pick up something off the floor — difficulty indicative of a loss of flexibility. As people age, reduced muscle power and loss of balance can greatly increase the risk of dangerous falls.

Patients would benefit from learning about the importance of staying fit and have concrete information about where they have room to improve. While there are many existing clinical tests assessing flexibility, balance and muscle strength, most are too impractical or time-consuming.

So Dr. Araujo and his colleagues developed an alternative, which they call the sitting-rising test, or SRT. It requires no equipment or walking paths — just a clear patch of floor and a willing participant.

Try It

• Stand in comfortable clothes in your bare feet, with clear space around you.
• Without leaning on anything, lower yourself to a sitting position on the floor.
• Now stand back up, trying not to use your hands, knees, forearms or sides of your legs.

Scoring

The two basic movements in the sitting-rising test — lowering to the floor and standing back up — are each scored on a 1-to-5 scale, with one point subtracted each time a hand or knee is used for support and 0.5 points subtracted for loss of balance; this yields a single 10-point scale.

According to the study,

• people who scored fewer than eight points on the test, were twice as likely to die within the next six years compared with those who scored higher
• those who scored three or fewer points were more than five times as likely to die within the same period compared with those who scored more than eight points.

Overall, each point increase in the SRT score was associated with a 21 percent decrease in mortality from all causes.