When pulling on a sock, you sometimes have to do a little hop to stay upright. In fact, at that moment, your body performed a small balance test and only just passed it. Now let’s do the same test consciously. Stand up and lift one foot off the floor. You can keep reading the article at the same time.
At some point, your ankle makes itself known. It wobbles and trembles, your toes grip the floor, and your hip wants to drop to the side. Nothing is wrong; that is exactly how it works. “This is not a static pose but a continuous sequence of micro-movements,” writes men’s health physician Margus Punab in his viral Facebook post, in which he calls standing on one leg one of the best ways to assess how the body is ageing.
In Punab’s description, an entire chain is at work at that moment. The sole of the foot, the ankle and the tendons detect even the slightest change in pressure against the floor. The inner ear acts “like a spirit level inside the body” and reports the position of the head. The eyes find a fixed point in the room against which to compare everything else. The cerebellum gathers this information, and the cerebral cortex sends commands to the muscles: “Tighten the calf muscle, relax the toes!” At the same time, the gluteus medius keeps the hips level and the deep muscles keep the back stable, because otherwise the upper body would tip to the side and the test would be over.
This is also why such a simple test reveals so much. During a squat or on a treadmill, stronger parts of the body can do some of the work for weaker ones. When standing on one leg, there is nowhere for anything to hide. According to Punab, the test puts the entire system under strain at once and therefore shows “primarily the function of the weakest link in the chain”. The weak link may be an ankle sprained years ago or a gluteal muscle that has grown lazy in an office chair. It may also be the nerves, which no longer transmit signals as quickly due to, for example, the early stages of diabetic neuropathy. The stopwatch does not tell you which link it is. It tells you how long the chain as a whole can hold out.
It is known with surprising precision how quickly this time decreases with age. In a study published in PLOS ONE, gait, grip strength, knee muscle strength and balance were measured in 40 people over the age of 50. Of these, single-leg standing time showed the clearest association with age. It decreased by about two seconds per decade, equally in men and women. Muscle strength declined more slowly. Gait did not change at all, so there may be nothing noticeable to an observer. Rezaei et al., 2024
In a larger comparative study, 549 adults stood in the same position as in the FitQ test: arms crossed over the chest, eyes open, for a maximum of 45 seconds. The best of three attempts averaged 42 seconds for people in their forties, 41 for those in their fifties, 32 for those in their sixties, 22 for those in their seventies and 9 for those over eighty. Springer et al., 2007
These figures tell us that if you are in your forties and in good shape, you can probably stand for 45 seconds on either leg. But at some point, that result will inevitably begin to decline rapidly.
If 45 seconds was too easy, close your eyes. In the same comparative study, people in their forties managed an average of 13 seconds this way. Punab explains why: by closing our eyes, “we completely cut off one of the three important sources of sensory input”. One of the three sources of information disappears, and less than a third of the standing time remains.
Is all this anything more than a party trick for competing with friends? What does the research tell us? In Brazil, 1,702 people aged 51–75 were asked to stand on one leg for ten seconds. One in five could not do it. Over the next seven years, 17.5 percent of them died, compared with 4.6 percent of those who succeeded. Even after accounting for age, sex, body mass index and medical conditions, the risk of death was 84 percent higher in the first group. Of course, no one dies because they cannot stand on one leg, but this test is one of the simplest and cheapest (free) ways to spot potential problems. Araujo et al., 2022
If you are middle-aged today, this test actually says more about your parents than it does about you. Among people in their seventies, the average result is just over 20 seconds, with considerable variation between individuals. Do the test with your parents the next time you visit them, in the kitchen, with the back of a chair within reach. At this age, good balance helps significantly reduce falls. A Cochrane review summarized 108 studies involving more than 23,000 participants with an average age of 76. Exercise that trained balance and everyday movements reduced falls by nearly a quarter. Cochrane review
If your result is clearly below the average for your peers, you now know what to work on. Balance responds well to practice, and you need nothing but a routine. Brush your teeth standing on one leg, one in the morning and the other in the evening; the sink is right there within reach for support. If your balance has deteriorated suddenly or for no apparent reason, tell your doctor.
Take the test for free on the FitQ platform
In the FitQ test, you stand on one leg with your eyes open and your arms crossed over your chest. The camera measures the time, each attempt lasts up to 45 seconds, and your best result for each leg is recorded. The upper limit comes from the same comparative study, so you can compare your result directly with those figures. It is the measurement limit, not your own. Take the test on a level, non-slip floor with support within reach.
45 seconds is a nice goal, but it is even nicer to feel that your body supports you on a root-covered forest trail where the path is uneven, or that you can stay upright when your sock is still only halfway on.
Try our balance test for free in the tests section and find out which age standard your current balance corresponds to.
