get up

This is a get up exercise. I want to show you guys today, very beneficial for anybody. One of the biggest factors of all-cause mortality is being able to get up and off the ground. And this is going to teach you how to get up and off the ground without using your hands. So very simple, you’re going to find… You don’t necessarily need a couch or a pillow. It would be a lot more comfortable. I’m going to show you both on the stability pad and off the stability pad today.

So simply starting out, you just get on both knees like this, you raise one leg up here and then the other, and you stand up very, very simple. That would be the most basic version of the exercise. If you did have something to put your knees on. You can, this is just purely for comfort. It’s not really affecting the exercise. If you do have a stability pad, you can stand on and make it a little bit more difficult, but this is generally just for pure comfort.

So how to make it a little bit more difficult is you would raise the hand up of… Like that you’re going to step forward with. So in this case, I have my left hand up. I’m going to step forward with my right, and I just want to look at my fingertips the whole time, step up and then up the other way, and then do the same thing on the way down here. Look up, lunge down, back to the other leg. If that becomes too easy for you, you can try the opposite arm, opposite leg. That would be contralateral movement. That’s going to be a little bit more difficult, that would be kind of the last progression of this here. 

So to recap, just start going from the floor to knees, just hands in front of you stepping up, lunging back, stepping down when that becomes too easy. You, same arm, same leg, this case, it’s my left. And then if that becomes too easy, you can switch arms and do more of a contralateral step up there. So that is the step up. Another way you can progress is to add weight in the hand. You want to make sure you’re keeping that shoulder perfectly straight though. So that is a great exercise for long-term health and stability.

-EarthFIT Coach Sam