Your score for getting up off the floor runs from 0 to 10

At the Clinimex clinic in Rio de Janeiro, 2,002 adults between 51 and 80 sat down on the floor and got back up in front of an assessor holding a scoring sheet. They were given a mark from 0 to 10. The exercise took under a minute and measured one thing only: whether you could get down to the floor and back up without holding on to anything.

The test is called the sitting-rising test, it was designed by the cardiologist Claudio Gil Araújo — the director of that clinic, which specialises in exercise medicine — and it works like this. You put on loose clothes and go barefoot or in socks. From standing, you lower yourself until you are sitting on the floor. Then you get up. You start with five points for going down and five for coming up, ten in all, and you subtract: one point every time you put down a hand, a forearm or a knee, or sit on your own thigh; half a point if you visibly lose your balance. There is no cheating, because every support is there to be seen.

Those 2,002 patients were followed for a median of 6.3 years. A hundred and fifty-nine of them died. Crossing the deaths with the scores, a very sharp step appeared: those who had scored between 0 and 3 had all-cause mortality five to six times higher than those who had scored between 8 and 10. The step was still there after adjusting for age, sex and body mass index, and the work was published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

Getting down to the floor and up again without hands demands four things at once: strength relative to your own body weight, hip and ankle mobility, balance and coordination. They are the four that never show up in a blood test and that almost nobody trains separately. Araújo calls them non-aerobic fitness: what is left when you take the heart and lungs out of the equation. A low score does not kill you; it signals that those four capacities are low at the same time, and that is what goes with falls, with broken hips and with the months in bed that come afterwards. Nor were the 2,002 participants a sample of the population: they went to a clinic for an exercise assessment, and those people are healthier and more attentive to their bodies than average. And the score is a marker, not a cause. Nobody has shown that going from 4 to 8 points lengthens your life by itself; what has been shown is that strength, mobility and balance can be trained at any age.

Clear a metre and a half of smooth floor, with no rug and nothing on wheels nearby. Stand near a wall, a hand's width away, in case you go sideways: touching it counts as a support and costs you a point, and even so it is better to lose a point than to fall. Go down slowly. Come up slowly. If you feel a sharp pain in your knee or hip, stop there: the test is designed for people without an acute injury, and if you have a knee or hip replacement it is not your test, it is your physiotherapist's. If today you score a 6 because you put a hand down going down and another coming up, your score is 6 and that is fine: the value of the number is that you can repeat it in two months.

Araújo's study measured and trained nobody. What moves that number are the four capacities the test measures, and it is distinctly unglamorous. First: sit down and stand up from a chair, twenty times, arms crossed on your chest, three days a week, and when that gets easy, do it on one leg, with the other stretched out in front and off the floor. Second: ankles. Kneel with one foot forward and try to take the knee past the toes without lifting the heel; two minutes per foot. That is the restriction that causes the most hands down, because without ankle range there is no deep squat. Third: stay on the floor doing something that lasts, instead of touching it and getting out. Five minutes sitting down there every day, watching something or folding laundry, does more for your hips than a thirty-second stretch. Between forty and sixty a lot of people stop setting foot on the floor with their hands free and never notice that they have stopped.

Do it like this: tonight, before bed, get down on the floor and back up, counting your supports out loud. Write the number in your phone with the date. Write it again on the same day in December.