Standing up from a chair or the floor

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Introduction

From sitting in a chair to standing and spiraling up to stand from the floor, all of these lessons are about weight shift and leveraging your mass over your base.

How do we move our mass over our base? I can attest that most of us have no idea. I can’t tell you how many clients come in to see me and try to come up to stand with their rear end behind their feet instead of moving over their feet. They uumph and grunt and push with their hands and grit with their teeth in an effort to lift their weight.

This is especially dangerous if you’re already injured, hyper-extended in the back, or start with balance challenges.

Don’t worry, there are better ways. Life can get easier. Use these lessons to reeducate your habits with basic somatic intelligence that will last a lifetime.

This lesson needs a chair with a flat seat.

This is a super informative lesson about how comfortable you may or may not be as you come to stand. As you start identify your habits, you will come to stand while watching your breath. Try various options with your elbows and knees close together, then far apart. Test standing and jumping while breathing in and breathing out. Then fold your spine and come to stand with your feet wide, then narrow. All of these options help you find neutral, easy weight shift over your feet.

You'll find coming to stand much, much easier after this, especially if you struggle with joint issues.

This lesson needs a chair with a flat seat.

I give this lesson to almost everyone to enhance upright sitting. What a lovely relief to feel the spine sinking into the pelvis, into the hip joints, into the sit bones.
Feel how your bones support you as you come to stand. Why do you need all this skeletal support? Why not just use the muscles? Well, after years and years and years of inefficient muscular contractions, you are more likely to become injured, in chronic pain, immobile, or endlessly fatigued. By then, your compensation for the lack of skeletal support will be deeply ingrained and more difficult to shift.

So take the time now to feel where your spine is, where your weight is, and how to lever elegantly over your base. Start with standing and oscillating in your ankles. Then sit and feel the tilt in your hip joints with a plumb line to your tailbone. Feel where your weight drops. By the end, the sense of organization improves just by exploring all these variables. Feel how you transfer weight to your feet without unnecessary effort.

This lesson needs a chair with a flat seat.

This lesson helps you sense in yet another way how to bring your mass over your base. Think about it: no one can come to stand with their rear end behind their feet! The trajectory, speed, and timing of moving your mass over your base can either make it very easy or incredibly awkward to stand up.

We've all seen the awkward version. Many people “uumph” their way up to stand by pushing off with their hands and teetering sideways before landing on a foot. This is unhelpful and can be more damaging over time. The back muscles effort and strain to get the weight up when really what we need is leverage.

All of these sit-to-stand lessons will help you learn the easy way to stand, not the difficult way. If it feels difficult, play with the variables, even if you modify the spatial relationship of the feet for your own safety. You'll be surprised how far you can go forward!

Tip: Forward and then up is your friend. The other way, up and then forward, will quickly prove your enemy. Test the former even if it seems counterintuitive at first.

If you’ve never done a spiral weight-shift lesson, start with this one to sense the art of counterbalance.

The next three lessons build on this spiral pattern. Once you feel the logic of the weight shift instead of the muscular “uumph!”, you feel elegant and weightless.

These fabulous weight-shift lessons help you leverage your head and pelvis in a precise balance.

This lesson continues the pattern of the previous one with an added twist of coming up to stand. As you spiral from sitting to standing, you start cross-legged, then stand your foot in front, with one hand behind. Bring your head down and your pelvis up. From your back, you will be guided to tilt your knees and sweep your hand overhead. You continue the trajectory to bring the arm toward the ceiling—don’t worry, it will all make sense when you do it!

This is a very cool lesson. Another spiral movement from lying down all the way up to standing.

Using the arms in a hoop, you rotate your trunk to pivot to the side. One knee flops down, one foot stands. As you put a hand down, you round the back and bring the head forward. Feel the counterbalance of the pelvis and the head.

From standing, you can reverse spiral down to sit 180 degrees.

(AY145)

This is a further study in precise weight shift and skeletal support, similar to the other two lessons. From the floor, you reach with the arm to connect into your middle. You come onto the elbow, draw your knees up, and come onto the knees while reaching your arm toward ceiling. The arm continues to the ceiling as you stand on one foot, then up to standing.

By continuing to ask your system to feel many different ways to spiral your weight, you will get better and better at sensing where you are in space. It is like a puzzle to solve: Knowing that there's an easy, effortless way to do these lessons, if it's difficult, what can you change about the orientation, trajectory, and timing of your head, chest, legs, eyes, belly, and feet?

Tip: If you feel clunky coming up to stand: (1) Notice where your eyes are. Are you looking down? (2) Now notice the angle of your arm. It matters where it's going as your head will follow it. If it's not easy to come up to stand, test another angle.

To develop more skill in weight shift and rolling, see:
34 Weight shift to roll in circles and up to stand
Four points series
Leg over to stand series
Counterbalance 1 & 2

This lesson is technically not coming up to stand. You just roll across the mid-line in a nice, easy, balanced way. As you start to feel how the limbs affect the center of mass, you across the center and feel how the timing, sequence, speed, and angle of the limbs create a smooth transition from one side to the other.

Figuring out how to leverage the floor is vital to smooth rolling. This is one lesson you can do over and over, continuously refining your timing and sense of balance. It’s a lovely, integrating, yummy lesson.

For more like this, see:
310, 311, 312 How to roll to the side