Getting On & Off the Floor
The Difference Isn't Age
My daughter, Leonie, is fifteen months old, and at this age life happens on the floor. So that's where I spend a lot of my time — and it's where her grandparents head the moment they walk in. She has six of them, three sets, all in their sixties, and every one gets down on the carpet to play with her.
Getting down is easy for them but getting back up looks different for each one.
One comes up in a single motion, without a thought. Another reaches for the edge of the couch, takes a second to organize, and pushes hard to standup. None of them get stuck down there - but the differences between them is noticeable, and a little surprising for six people born within a few years of each other.
We’re often told our ability to do move is going to decrease with age and that we need to get used to it.
However, if getting off the floor came down to age, six people within years of each other would do it about the same way. They don’t and what separates them isn’t the difference in years - what separates them is decades of small differences in what they asked of their bodies.
One movement, four questions
Standing up asks four things at once.
A machine trains one quality in isolation. The floor asks all four in the same few seconds, with nothing held steady for you.
One Movement, Four Questions
Standing up off the floor looks like a simple task, but it’s really four different tasks all happening at the same time.
You need the strength to lift your own weight from the floor. You need the speed to do it in one committed motion instead of a long grind. You need enough mobility in your hips and ankles to fold all the way down and open all the way back up. And you need the balance to manage it on a base that keeps shrinking and shifting — one knee, the sides of your feet, a single hand.
Most training works one of those at a time, and that specificity is useful — a machine holds a path so you can load a specific muscle hard, a bench takes balance out so you can press more weight. The floor does the opposite. It asks all four questions in the same few seconds. That's what makes it such a complete picture: it shows you which quality is ready and which one still has room for improvement.
That's why this one movement tracks so closely with how a person is doing overall. Researchers built it into a simple scored test — lower yourself to sitting on the floor, come back to standing, and count how much you had to lean on a hand or a knee along the way — and the scores line up with how people are faring more broadly. Not because the floor holds any secret, but because a good score is hard to earn without the qualities underneath it. And those qualities can be built.
It's still in there
For the grandparent who works hardest to stand: the strength, the range, the speed — all of it can be built. A body keeps what it uses and lets the rest fade into the background. But ask for it again and it returns. Maybe not as quickly as we’d like, and yes, it’ll take some work, but a lot more can comeback than most would expect.
Learn it in reverse
The instinct, if you want to get better at standing up, is to do it over and over until it stops being hard. There's a smarter way, and it turns the movement around.
Learn it in reverse · Backward chaining
Start at the top. Earn your way down.
Begin standing, in control, and lower only as far as you can come back from. Each rep ends on your feet — never on a collapse.
One rule runs through all of it: never lower yourself past the point you can rise from. Every rep proves you can do it.
Rather than starting on the floor and battling upward, you start at the top — standing, steady, in control — and lower yourself only as far as you know you can come back from. A short way down, then up. Once that's easy, a little lower, then up. You build from lowering down toward the floor instead of from the floor up toward standing, so every rep ends on your feet.
Approaching it this way, you never have to attempt the failed, half-collapsed attempts that make getting up feel risky to begin with. Each repetition closes on a success. The method is called backward chaining, and I like this approach because stacking up wins, one after another, rebuilds the ability and the confidence at the same time.
A way to start:
Sit down into a chair and rise without using your hands. When that feels easy, you've found today's starting height.
Swap the chair for something lower — a stool, a step, a couple of cushions — and hold the same standard: hands free, in control.
Put a half-kneel in the middle. Down to one knee, back up, until moving through that in-between feels ordinary.
Drop the height a little at a time as you earn it, until the height is the ground.
One rule runs through all of it: never lower yourself past the point you can rise from. Keep that, and each rep proves to you and your body that you can do it.
The rest of what the floor wants
Backward chaining builds the strength and the pattern. A few smaller habits round out everything else the floor asks for.
Speed is the piece most people forget. The grandparents who rise easily aren't just stronger than the ones who struggle — they're quicker. Standing up has a moment where you commit and go, and that moment runs on power, not patience. You can build a little of it safely: stand out of a chair a bit faster than feels natural, or do a few easy step-ups on to a step where you push up a little harder than normal. A small amount changes a lot.
Time on the floor is the cheapest habit and the first one most people drop. Chairs are comfortable, and years of them quietly take back the hip and ankle range that folding to the ground requires. Sitting on the floor to read or watch something — cross-legged, on your knees, switching it up when you get stiff — keeps those joints familiar with the positions the movement depends on.
Balance is worth a few minutes too, because the rise plays out on such a small, moving base. A half-kneel held for a few breaths, or a minute on one foot while the coffee brews can do more than one would expect to help maintain your balance.
Lastly, give yourself more than one way up. There's no single right path off the floor — you can roll to a hip and press through a kneel, rise through a half-kneel into a lunge, or rock into a squat and stand. Practice only one and you're fine until the day a sore knee or shoulder rules it out. Know a few and you've always got another option.
The end I'm aiming for
Someday my daughter will be the one watching someone get up off the floor — and there's a decent chance it'll be me, down there to be close to her the way her grandparents are now.
How I get up then won’t be determined by my age. It's being built now, in the unremarkable years, by whether I keep getting down to the ground and back up -or not.
My ability to get on and off the floor has gotten a lot better over the last year for one reason: it became a daily habit. So get down on the floor, and get back up, until your body treats it as nothing.