#1 Exercise for Balance and Strength (60+)
"So my number one exercise for older adults that have a feeling of weakness or difficulty with endurance or they get tired with their movements or they're having trouble with their balance, this is an amazing foundational exercise, and it's called the sit-to-stand exercise.
This Exercise Works every muscle in the lower half. It forces your system to kind of think about balance and the proper way to move your weight around above your feet, which helps with your walking as well. And it also strengthens the same muscles that we need for elevations and getting up and down curb steps and stairs and things like that. So it's extremely simple, but there are some details involved that I want to make sure that we are on target with here and that you understand. You should be getting up from a chair or a bed the same way that I'm going to teach you here.
So to start the exercise, we're going to obviously be sitting down. You may be sitting back in your chair watching television, things like that. The first move, you need to move your bottom closer to the front of the chair. Move your bottom closer to the front of the chair. Your second move is to bring your feet back toward you as close as you can get to the chair. Okay, now if you have difficulty in moving your knees and bending your knees comfortably, just get them back as far as you possibly can.
When you do this exercise, try and choose a solid chair that's not going to slip in case you do kind of have a tendency to do what we call vaulting that I just described. Your body will move away from that as you get stronger with the exercise. So we should also pick chairs that have armrests to use to push up on. If there are not armrests, you can have your hands on the chair itself, but I prefer us to have a chair like a kitchen chair to practice this exercise from.
Our bottom is forward in the chair, our feet are back, okay, pretty much as far as they can get comfortably because we want them underneath our weight when we begin to lift that weight over top of the feet. Hands go on the armrests.
Now, the mistake that a lot of people make is that they think that when they stand, they should be moving their body straight up. So they will stand up this way, and if you try that, it's actually more difficult on your legs. It requires more power to stand with your body going straight up. What I would like you to practice is after your bottom is forward, your feet are back, and your hands are in place, I want you to push in a forward direction so you're going to move your body more towards the wall ahead of you, rather than move your body towards the ceiling. Once you get your body and your bottom up moving forward, then you can stand up and be straight up.
Okay, so you're going to lean your shoulders forward, get your nose over your toes or ahead, and slowly, carefully, thinking about your balance, push in a forward direction and then come to full standing.
Sitting back down is the reverse. You lean forward, hands go back, bend the knees, and your bottom returns to where it began.
Okay, so again, let me reiterate, let me repeat exactly the same process. You're sitting and let's say it's time to do the exercise. Bring your bottom to the front of the chair. That's number one. Move your bottom to the front of the chair. Number two, your feet come back as far as they can get underneath you. That's two. Number three, hands on the armrests or hands on the chair itself. That's three. Number four, we're bending forward. Number five, we're pushing forward. Number six, we're standing straight up. Then we're reversing everything. Tilt forward with the shoulder, shoulders reach back, return your bottom to the front of the chair, and then you can move back and scoot back and relax when you're finished the exercise.
Now, what I believe is that counting an exercise, counting the repetitions of an exercise, can actually have a negative impact on the end result physiologically in what the body is feeling in terms of what you're trying to accomplish from that exercise. So most people that have experience with exercise in the past will always gravitate towards a number like 10 or 15 because they're nice round numbers in an exercise class. You know somebody may have told you well you should do 10 repetitions of this and then move on to the next exercise. Strengthening of your body happens in the last few repetitions that you can actually tolerate.
So what I want you to do is do as many of these as you can carefully and slowly until your body says you need to take a break. When your body says you need to take a break, by all means, sit down and then you've banked the benefit from pushing your body to a limit. Your body will start to recognize that it needs to develop strength and endurance because you're asking it to do more and that's the whole key with this exercise as a foundation for all the other stuff that we recommend on our channel.
It's the number one exercise that I have for older adults. I give it to every single patient that I have regardless of what they're struggling with. So again, remember that we're trying to do as many repetitions as possible until your body feels like it needs to take a break. Now your body will tell you how often you can do this exercise. If you start with this exercise once or twice today, tomorrow, your body will speak to you. If you're not used to exercising, your muscles may be sore and your muscles will say, 'Hey, keep it at one or two times a day for now until we get used to this.' If your body does get used to it really quickly, you can do this quite often through the day, even every hour as it might be able to kind of break up your day and let your brain and your system kind of get a feeling that it's moving around and wanting to move around more often. And then that system starts to change and starts to build muscle and build strength in the muscle.
None of us are going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger from this exercise so we don't need to worry about that. We're just trying to build power so that you have it when you need to get up from a chair, get out of bed, go up and down the steps, step down from a curb, walk outside on uneven surfaces. And this will also help improve your balance. We hope you like this video. Click like, click subscribe, subscribe to the channel. I have more content coming that is helpful for older adults who might be struggling with any of these issues. Have a great day."
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