Can Your Ability to Squat Predict Your Life Expectancy?

Are you looking to get a sense of your state of health and a peak into your potential life expectancy?

Although it is absolutely impossible to predict life expectancy, experts have discovered a variety of factors that have been tested and proven to play a role in life expectancy.

In fact, there are tests that can be conducted at home to test these factors and give you a sense of your current state of health.

A Brazilian physician by the name of Claudio Gil Araújo came up with a test that could predict life expectancy with alarming accuracy (Araújo 1999).

After noticing that many of his patients, especially older ones, had difficulty with balance and strength, Araújo came up with a simple squatting test. Since overall balance and stability are known to increase the risk of dangerous falls and accidents as well as to affect cardiovascular health, Araújo wondered if a patient’s flexibility, balance and strength could be used as a measure of life expectancy.

Araújo and colleagues tested more than 2,000 patients aged between 51 to 80 years old and found that those who scored less than 8 points on the test were twice as likely to die within the next six years (De Brito et al. 2012).

Scoring

The test is scored on a point scale between 1 and 10 (5 points for sitting, 5 more points for standing back up). Each time you use an arm or knee for help yourself balancing during the test, one point is subtracted from 10 possible points. Half a point is subtracted each time you lose balance or when the fluidity of the feat becomes clumsy. Those who scored three points or less were five times more likely to die within that same time period.

Testing

Begin the test by standing upright in the middle of a room. Without using your arms or hands for leverage, carefully squat into a cross-legged sitting position. Once you’re comfortable, attempt to stand back up from the sitting position — again, without using your arms for help.

Regardless of your age, the test should provide a useful benchmark for your overall health. If you’re younger than 50 and have trouble with this test, it ought to be a wake-up call.