Contrary to what you may have heard, sitting is not the new smoking. Despite a spate of articles to that effect in recent years, researchers debunked that claim in the Journal of Public Health in 2018. This is not to say that sitting is good for us, especially when done for eight or more hours a day.
But there is one kind of sitting that can actually do us some good, according to two mobility experts: sitting on the floor. And they recommend that we do it in segments that add up to 30 minutes a day.
In their recent book “Built to Move,” Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett explain that sitting in chairs for “freakish” amounts of time puts too much stress on certain parts of our body, like our femurs and hamstrings, and can cause not only back pain, but knee pain. We can give our bodies a break — and invest in our long-term mobility — by spending some of our sitting time on the floor.
“There’s a reason that cross-legged sitting and kneeling are the postures of choice for meditation,” they write. “As you butterfly your legs out, you rotate the femurs in the hip capsule — this is called externally rotating the hips to their end range — and create a very stable platform upon which to sit.”
Equally important is that being able to get down on the floor and get back up easily is a vitally important skill to have, especially as we age. Yet it’s something that few of us do as adults, and the motions get increasingly more difficult if we don’t practice them. “Most adults (other than parents of toddlers) simply don’t place themselves in these positions, even though they are fundamentally human ways to arrange the body,” the Starretts write.
If sitting with your legs crossed is too difficult, you can sit on the floor leaning against a chair, couch or wall (though ultimately it’s better to not need support). Other options are what the Starretts call “90/90” sitting — bending one leg at a 90-degree angle in front of you, one at a 90-degree angle with your foot behind you — or “long sitting,” which does not refer to time, but to keeping your back straight and your legs stretched out in front of you.
“There are no wrong ways to sit on the ground. Variety is the goal,” the Starretts write. And if 30 minutes a day is too daunting, “Start where you’re at and work up to thirty.” They promise that, done regularly, sitting on the floor — and the motions of getting down there and back up again — will help with stability and agility, and maybe even help you with a famous test of longevity: the sit-and-rise test.
That test became famous after the publication of a 2014 study that found the inability to get up and down from the floor without using your hands was associated with a higher risk of mortality. There are plenty of videos online that show how to do the test, which The Washington Post once called “anxiety inducing.” For the record, I couldn’t do it, and neither could my 24-year-old son. But the Starretts assure us that this is a skill that can be learned, and even if we can’t get to the point where we can rise without needing some support, we can definitely get more fluid in getting up and down with daily practice.
“Our bodies are built to sit in ground-based positions, so when you spend some time on your nice parquet floor or plush rug each day, you’re helping to ‘rewild’ your hip joints,” they write. “Sitting on the floor restores their range of motion, which will not only make it easier to get up and down, but also potentially remedy the musculoskeletal issues associated with so much chair time.”
They also note that in doing these motions, we’re going back to a time in which we did them regularly: childhood. One 2012 study at New York University showed that toddlers fall and get back up 17 times an hour (albeit sometimes with tears).
“Why have most of us lost these elementary abilities in the first place?” the Starretts write. “It all comes down to one simple object: the chair.”
So stay out of it as much as you can, and when you need to sit, consider the floor your friend.