The sitting-rising test has exact scoring rules, and reference scores for 6,141 adults aged 16 to 98
How do you score the sit-and-rise test?
The finding
Each action starts at 5. Take off 1 for each hand, forearm, knee or side of the leg used, or a hand on the knee; take off 0.5 if the evaluator sees an unsteady execution. The best score for each action counts, whatever the number of attempts.
- Authors
- Araújo CGS, Castro CLB, Franca JFC, Araújo DS
- Published
- European Journal of Preventive Cardiology 27(8):888–90 · 2020
- Evidence
- Read in the primary source; numbers checked.
- Source
- doi.org/10.1177/2047487319847004
How it was studied
Retrospective clinic data, July 1998 to February 2018: 6,141 non-athlete adults (4,101 men) aged 16–98, excluding anyone with a locomotor or clinical limitation to the test.
The numbers
The test is done barefoot on a non-slip floor with at least 2 m × 2 m of space. The instruction is to sit and rise "using the least support that you believe is needed", without worrying about speed. Crossing the legs is allowed if the sides of the feet are not used for support.
Age- and sex-specific percentiles are in the letter’s figure and supplement, which were not readable for this review, so no band values are quoted here.
What it does not show
One clinic, two-thirds men, self-selected. Cross-sectional, so it shows how scores differ by age, not how one person’s score changes. The half-point deduction is a single judgment by the rater, so scores near 10 depend on who is watching.
What Longstanding does with it
The app’s sit-and-rise percentiles could not be traced to a readable source and are labelled unverified on this site. The app’s scoring also differs from this protocol: it takes 0.5 off per loss of balance rather than once, does not mention a hand on the knee, and records one attempt rather than the best of several. Those are known gaps, listed on the test page.