Difficulty Standing Up From A Low Chair, Couch, or Toilet? Try These Simple Tips

Many People Have Trouble Standing Up From Low Chairs, Couches, and Toilets

When you stand up from a chair, couch, or toilet, you need to raise your center of gravity from behind your knees to over top of your knees.

However, the taller you are (or the lower the chair is), the harder this task becomes.

Once your hips sink below the level of your knees, it makes it substantially harder to stand up.

Standing Up From A Couch With Hips At Knee Height

Let's first start out with a higher surface where your hips are at about the level of your knees, and then we'll progress to lower surfaces from there.

The Soft Couch Trap

When you sit on a soft couch, it may be more difficult for you to stand up.

That's because the effective height of the couch isn't the actual height; it's the height to which you sink after the couch cushion has compressed.

The Standing Up Secret

The easiest way to stand up from a chair or couch if your hips are at or above the height as your knees is to do a nose-over-toes or hip-hinging motion.

When you do this, you bring your center of gravity forward over your feet.

Additionally, this makes your spine like a lever with the fulcrum over your knees.

Therefore, as your head goes down, your hips come up.

So there's very little leg muscle effort involved.  It's just physics.

Once you get your weight loaded over your feet, and your bottom leaves the couch, you can stand up by pushing your hips forwards.

By thinking about pushing your hips forward rather than straightening your knees, you use your glute muscles more than your quadriceps muscles.

This can almost instantly decrease or eliminate knee pain when standing up from a low chair or couch.

"But what if I fall?"

Although this technique is extremely effective to relieve knee pain when standing up from sitting, many people are fearful of doing this.

They're afraid that they're going to keep going and face plant on the floor.

But the reality of it is, that your center of mass is behind your feet.

So if you're going to fall anywhere, you're just going to plop right back down on the couch or on the chair.

So that's the solution for standing up if your hips are at or slightly above knee level.

But what about standing up from a lower surface.

How To Stand Up From A Low Chair

Let's say you want to do a craft or have a tea party with your grandchildren at a children's table.

Or maybe you want to work out in the garden and sit on a garden stool.

In both cases, need to be able to stand back up.

But again, when your hips are lower than your knees, it's harder to stand up from sitting.

That's because the torque around the axis of rotation at the knees is no longer in an up and forwards direction.

It's actually in an up and slightly backward direction until you get to 90 degrees.

Then once your hips get above the level of your knees, the direction of the torque is up and forward again.

To make it easier to stand up, you have to change the axis of rotation.

To do that, put your hands on the chair underneath your bottom.

Now you're actually pivoting with an axis of rotation on your hands rather than around your knees.

That also shortens the lever arm, making it substantially easier to get up.

Lean forward and pivot around your hands until your hips pop up to above knee level.

Then you can use the "head down, hips up" technique described above.

Use your glutes to push your pelvis forward over your feet, and you're standing.

Again, there's not really a lot of muscle effort.

It's just using physics.

Now you can use this same principle to get up from a low toilet.

How To Get Up From A Low Toilet Seat

If you have difficulty getting up from a low toilet seat, follow these steps:

1. Scoot all the way back on the toilet seat
2. Spread your legs wide enough that you can put your hands between them.
3. Put your hands on the front of the toilet seat.
4. Lean your head down and use your hands like a pivot point to pop your hips up.
5. Squeeze your glutes and push your hips forwards to stand up.

How To Get Up From A Low Chair Without Using Hands

What if you want to be able to stand up from a low surface without using your hands though?

In real life, there's no rule to say that you can't use your hands.

In fact, if I were to stand up from a low chair in real life, I would probably use my hands even though I'm capable of standing up without them.

But if you want to have the option to stand up without using your hands, having more leg strength gives you a higher resiliency buffer.

This essentially means being ABLE to do more than you NEED to do.

The greater your resiliency buffer, the greater range of movement options you have.

The No-Hand Sit-to-Stand

If you're sitting with your hips below the level of your knees, rather than change the axis of rotation to your hands, you can change it to your ankles.

To do this, spread your knees out a little bit so you can get a little greater range of hip bending between your legs.

This helps shift your center of gravity over your ankles.

Now you're rotating around your ankles while doing doing an isometric hold with your quad muscles.

The knee angle isn't really changing, but this does require a little quad strength to maintain the position.

Once your hips get up to knee level or above, and then you can use the previous principles to stand back up.

Again though, this takes more strength than the prior techniques.

In order to develop you leg strength in this low squat position without hurting your knees, you can try doing a modified horse stance exercise.

Better yet, if you're having pain or difficulty getting up from a chair, you'll probably get better faster by seeing a professional.

If you're in the St. Louis area, tap the button below to request an appointment with one of our specialist physical therapists.

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