Get Off the Chair

I made my living in a chair for a long time. I do not anymore. Once I stopped, the cost of all those years became visible in a way that it cannot be while you are still inside the deal — the locked hips, the dead glutes, the lower back that hurt for no reason, the neck that always seemed to have something to say. None of that came from getting old. All of it came from sitting in chairs for thousands of hours.

Sitting is a choice. It is presented to you as a default — work happens in chairs, meals happen in chairs, cars happen in chairs, screens happen in chairs — and the cumulative result is that the average modern adult has spent more hours of their life in a chair than upright. That is not how the body was designed to operate. The body was designed to squat, to kneel, to sit cross-legged on the ground, to stand, to walk, to crouch, to pick things up, to climb, to reach. The chair is a one-position prison the species voluntarily walked into about a hundred years ago, and the species is paying the structural bill.

The office is the floor

The mat lives in my office. That is where the floor practice happens, for now. The plan is to spread it through the rest of the house, but I am not going to lie to you about where I am today — the dinner table is still a dinner table, the couch is still a couch. The office, though, is the room where I spend more hours than any other in the day, and the office has been converted. There is a mat on the floor, there is a balance ball, there is no chair I sit in for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

I sit on the mat. Sometimes cross-legged. Sometimes on my heels. Sometimes splayed out with one leg long. Sometimes I am on the ball. The position rotates because the floor demands that the position rotate — you cannot hold one shape on the floor for hours the way you can hold one shape in a chair. The floor is honest. It tells you immediately when something has gone numb, when something is locked, when something needs to move. You move because the floor told you to.

Effie has her own mat. She sits on the floor too. I only have to help her up now and again, which is itself a measurement — she is increasingly her own engine on the way back up, and that is the whole point. The disease did not get a vote in this. The floor is for her too.

The first few weeks of this transition are uncomfortable. Hips that have not opened in years do not open in a day. The lumbar spine complains. The knees complain. Then, somewhere around the third or fourth week, the body figures out that this is the new default and starts to renovate. Hips loosen. Glutes wake up. The posterior chain — back, glutes, hamstrings, calves — stops working as four argued-out parts and starts working as one piece again. After a few months, you cross over into a strange, almost embarrassing place: you are uncomfortable in chairs. The dinner table feels wrong. The office chair feels wrong. The whole adult world is pre-compromised and you can feel it in real time.

That discomfort is not regression. It is the body telling you it has been upgraded.

The test

There is a test. It is called the sit-and-rise test, it was published out of Brazil about a decade ago, and it is the cheapest, simplest, most predictive single screening tool I have ever encountered. You stand up. You sit down to the floor, cross-legged, without using a hand, a knee, a wall, or any piece of furniture. Then you stand back up the same way. No hands. No knees. No leaning.

Out of ten possible points, every assist costs you a point. Every wobble costs half a point. The score correlates, with sobering tightness, with all-cause mortality risk in the next six years. People who score eight or above tend to keep living. People who score three or below tend not to. The test is not measuring anything mysterious. It is measuring a composite of strength, balance, mobility, and neural coordination — the exact bundle of properties a body needs to keep itself off the floor of a hospital. You can argue with the specifics; you cannot argue with the direction, which is that adults who can get up off the ground without help are the adults who keep functioning, and adults who cannot are the adults who do not.

Try it right now. Do not stretch first. Do not warm up. Just try it cold, the way you would have to in real life when something gets dropped. Most adults find out, immediately, that their body has quietly retired some functions they assumed they still had.

Build it into the day

Mobility is not a thirty-minute morning routine. Mobility is something you build into the way you live, or it does not stick. If you sit on the floor while you eat, you are doing mobility work. If you sit on the floor while you watch a movie, you are doing mobility work. If you play a board game on the floor, you are doing mobility work — and you are doing it for an hour or two without noticing. The point of moving the activity to the floor is that the floor makes you move. You shift positions every few minutes because you have to. Each shift is a rep.

In the office, work happens on the floor. I take meetings on the floor. I read at the desk from the floor. The mat is the chair, the chair is gone, and every transition off the mat is an unassisted stand-up — a micro-set I do dozens of times a day without thinking about it. By the end of a normal workday I have done a hundred small reps of getting up and down, and that is a hundred reps of the exact bundle the sit-and-rise test is grading.

Then there is the one-leg stand. We do one-leg stands daily, both eyes-open and eyes-closed. The eyes-closed version is humbling for most people the first time and stays humbling for a long time, because closing the eyes strips out the visual stabilization the nervous system has been quietly leaning on for decades, and now the ankles, the hips, the core, and the proprioceptors have to do the work alone. Ten seconds of single-leg stance at age fifty is, in another large body of literature, also a strong mortality predictor. The pattern is consistent: the body that can balance is the body that survives.

The Gibbon

We have a Gibbon — a balance board with a tensioned strap underneath, the indoor cousin of a slackline — and we both use it, at different times, because the disease imposes a queue. I get on it. Effie gets on it after, and I make this poor woman with multiple sclerosis stand on the strap, on purpose, repeatedly, while I spot her hands. Fuck MS, that is why. The disease has spent years telling her body it cannot be trusted; the strap calls the bluff. Every second she holds her balance on that line is a second the nervous system is being told, in the loudest signal a body can use, that the wiring is still here and we are still using it.

This is the underlying logic of every mobility and balance practice we run, but it is especially load-bearing for an MS body. Multiple sclerosis is, at the systems level, a disorder of signaling. Demyelination is bad signal. The standard playbook treats this as a one-way deterioration. The contrary playbook — the one we run — is to push high-quality signal back into the system every day, in volumes the nervous system cannot ignore, and to trust that the brain remains plastic and the cord remains responsive long after the official prognosis has stopped expecting either. Balance work is signal. Mobility is signal. Standing on a strap with your eyes open is signal. The brain hears.

You don’t need a Gibbon and a yoga studio. You need a mat, a floor, and a decision.

Move the daily activities you do in a chair onto the floor. Eating, reading, watching, phone time. The mat replaces the couch and the desk chair as the default surface for everything that doesn’t strictly require a desk.

Stop using your hands to get up. From a chair, from the floor, from anywhere. Make every transition an unassisted one. After a few weeks this stops being effortful and becomes how you move.

Take the sit-and-rise test today. Score yourself honestly. Re-test in a month. The score will move.

Do one-leg stands. Both legs, eyes open and eyes closed. Brush your teeth on one foot. Cook on one foot. Wait in line on one foot. Build it into wasted time you were going to be standing through anyway.

Add a balance challenge. A slackline if you have the space, an indoor balance board if you don’t. Five minutes a day is more than most adults will get for the rest of their lives.

For partners and caregivers: if you live with someone whose mobility is compromised, do this work with them, not for them. Help them up only when it’s genuinely needed. Every assist is a rep they didn’t get. The gift is the rep.

The chair isn’t neutral. The chair is doing something to you, every hour you spend in it, on a long enough timeline to make the damage feel like aging. It is not aging. It is a choice you can stop making. Get off the chair. Get on the floor. Stand back up without hands. Do it again tomorrow.