- The spread of self-tracking.
- Sitting down and getting up from floor test predicts longevity. Your score depends on how much support you need. “[The correlation with mortality] persisted when results were controlled for age, gender and body mass index, suggesting that the sitting-rising test score is a significant predictor of all-cause mortality; indeed, subjects in the [lowest] score range [score 0-3] had a 5-6 times higher risk of death than those in the reference group [score 8-10].”
- Psychiatric diagnoses, such as depression, widened by psychiatrists who take money from drug companies. One psychiatrist “was skeptical of efforts to reduce the financial ties to industry.“It has gotten to be a witch hunt,” he said.“Most academics have taken money from pharma if they’re successful,” he explained.”
Thanks to Alex Chernavsky and Tim Beneke.
I tried the sitting/rising test. Sitting is more difficult than standing. I use my left hand (non-dominant) for support.
It took about ten trials before I was able to sit, using the left hand for support, without the final inches being a controlled fall.
I may keep practicing this. I find it annoying that my score is at best 8.
We own a sofa from which none but the young can arise without a struggle. To my wife’s amusement, I do it by rolling into a kneeling position on the floor, and getting up from there. “Elegant!” I say, but she demurs.
I remember my first (and so far only) time to down hill ski. It was a few years ago at the Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior held at Winter Park, Colorado. I took lessons, of course, so I could learn appropriate technique. The instructor taught us how to unhinge the skis from our feet whenever we fell down so that we could stand up. Afterward, we would then be able to reattach the skis. This seemed like a lot of needless work to me and I asked why we couldn’t just get up again without taking off the skis? “You’ll see!” was their response. Well, I fell a lot (not surprising). When I did fall, it was usually by sliding backward onto my butt. From this position, it was quite easy actually to rise up in a squat position. Perhaps it was the fact that I had started doing weighted squats as part of my weekly exercise routine for the two years prior to the ski trip that helped. Perhaps the extra strength and power I had from eating a paleo diet helped, too. I was surprised how easy it was, and how much quicker to immediately get up to resume skiing than to take the skis off, get up, and put them back on, which was quite a pain in the tuckus. To this day, I find it quite easy to lower myself to a sitting position on the floor, and to rise again smoothly and easily. Now, the low and sagging couch at my aunt’s house, that’s another matter altogether!