Come On, Stand Up, Get Outta that Chair!

by Baxter

While waiting to put in my order at a café yesterday, I observed a toddler’s delight in sitting down between the café’s coffee bar and a foot rest pole about 12 inches off the floor, then standing right back up and grabbing her mom’s pant leg. She then repeated the process maybe 10 more times, with a huge smile on her face the whole time.

 Standing Baby (from Wikimedia)

I couldn’t help but contrast this with an elderly yoga student I had worked with years before whose main difficulty was in getting up out of a chair without help.

One can only wonder at what happens between the joyful discovery and repetition of the movement of a toddler and the decline that leads to trouble with such an everyday transition as standing up from sitting in a chair. The factors are many, from general physical weakness, loss of balance integration and proprioception (your body’s ability to know where it is in space, where it is moving and how fast), to multiple possible medical problems.

A regular hatha yoga practice may help you avoid this incapacity entirely. But if you do develop some difficulty in getting out of a chair, yoga could help retrain your muscles and improve your proprioception, allowing you greater ease in accomplishing this essential daily transition. 

With a regular hatha yoga practice that includes standing poses, you are both strengthening and stretching your body. But maybe more importantly, you are utilizing the nerve receptors for balance and kinesthetic sense, called proprioceptors, in a very active, conscious way. My theory is that this ability is down-regulated through disuse, but can be reactivated with yoga asana practice, or trained for the first time if your body just has been sedentary most of your life. This translates into greater ease in shifting your weight from a sitting position onto your feet and up through your legs to rise up gracefully out of your chair and out into life.   

In addition, older students are reluctant to get down on the floor, as they have observed that it is getting harder to get back up. Mindful work with yoga could lead to this transition becoming easier also, for the same reasons stated above, although it may take a little longer to achieve due to the increased challenges against gravity.

 

Stay tuned for the featured pose of the week, Powerful pose (Utkatasana), which is a key pose for the sit-to-stand transition. Update: You can see it here.