By Kiersten Willis, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Troy Warren for CNT #Health
How do you measure physical fitness?
According to J. Flowers Health Institute, it can include squats or bench presses to assess muscular health. Or it could mean performing walking or step aerobics to measure cardio heath.
But Eat This, Not That reported that if you’re over 50, failure to perform another test could indicate you need to exercise more.
Researchers described the test in the peer-reviewedEuropean Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention. The sitting-rising test involves being able to sit down on the floor and stand up from it. The study saw 2,002 adults ages 51-80 do the test. The participants, 68% of which were men, were scored from 0-5. One point was subtracted from 5 for each hand or knee they used. Final scores ranged from 0-10.
The results showed that lower SRT scores were linked to higher mortality. Researchers concluded that musculoskeletal fitness was a significant indicator of death in people ages 51 to 80.
You can perform the test by lowering yourself to the floor in a criss-cross fashion. Do so without bracing yourself with your hands, arms, knees or legs, the Washington Post reported. A perfect 10 means you earned five points for sitting and another five for standing. So, you stood back up without using other body parts.
“Frailty, strength, muscle mass, physical performance — those things are all correlated to mortality, but I would caution everybody that correlation doesn’t mean causation,” Dr. Greg Hartley, Board Certified Geriatric Clinical Specialist and associate professor at the University of Miami, told the newspaper. “For example, if somebody had a really bad knee and there’s no way they could do the test, just because that person has a really bad knee doesn’t mean they’re going to die soon.”
“The more active we are the better we can accommodate stressors the more likely we are to handle something bad that happens down the road,” Dr. Claudio Gil Araujo told USA Today. An exercise and sports medicine specialist, Araujo works with cardiac patients at Clinimex Exercise Medicine Clinic in Rio de Janeiro. That’s where he led a team that devised the SRT test, an easy measure of non-aerobic physical fitness.
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