You sat down on the floor to reach the back of a bottom cupboard, and getting back up took a plan. Nothing hurt. It was harder than it used to be, and you noticed. Women mention this to me more often than almost anything else, and they nearly always mention it sideways, halfway through a sentence about something else.
- Rising from the floor asks more of your hips and ankles than standing up from a chair does, so chair practice doesn’t cover it.
- Five 20-minute practice sessions took floor-rise time from 13.1 seconds to 7.1 seconds, and afterwards every trained participant could get up from lying on her back, against 63 percent of the group that only watched a video.
- The biggest functional gain from progressive strength training showed up in rising from a seat, measured across 121 trials and 6,700 people.
- Sixty-three women averaging 67.5 years lifted for 24 weeks at 75 to 85 percent of their one-repetition maximum, and peak power at the knee rose by 15.7 percent.
Why It Got Harder
Most women assume this is a knee problem, because your knees are what you feel on the way down.
Your knees are the smaller part of it.
Somebody actually went and measured it:
Researchers filmed 34 people rising from the floor and rising five times from a chair, and recorded the load going through every joint. Your ankles and hips work harder during the floor rise. Your knees work harder during the chair rise. The authors finished by saying that the exercises most likely to improve your floor rise are the ones that demand more of your hips and ankles than a chair rise does.
Stutzenberger L, Whited T. Floor-to-Stand Transfers in Older Adults: Insights into Strategies and Lower Extremity Demands. Geriatrics (Basel). 2025;10(5):119. PMID 40981289
That changes what you train.
Standing up from a chair is mostly your knees. Standing up from the floor uses your hips and ankles, through a much deeper range, with your whole body weight starting below them.
So you can pop out of a dining chair all day and still need two attempts on the floor. The two movements draw on different muscles, and only the chair comes up every day.
That same study turned up something else worth knowing. How capable the participants said they felt had no relationship to how long their floor rise actually took. Women who felt fine were sometimes slow, and women who felt unsteady were sometimes quick. Your own sense of how you’re doing does not predict how long the rise takes.
Speed matters too. Getting off the floor needs force delivered fairly quickly, and the ability to produce force quickly fades faster with age than raw strength does. You can train that back. I’ve written about the wider version of it in muscle loss after 50.
Getting Up Off the Floor, Step by Step
Here’s the sequence I teach, from lying on your back to standing:
- Roll onto your side. Bend your knees first and let them lead. Rolling is far easier than sitting straight up, and it costs your back nothing.
- Push up to side-sitting. Press through your bottom forearm and your top hand until you’re sitting on one hip.
- Come onto your hands and knees. Turn toward the floor and put both hands down.
- Bring one foot forward into a half-kneel. One knee down, one foot flat in front of you. Take your time getting that front foot properly under you.
- Drive through the front foot and stand. Push your hands off your front thigh if that helps. Bring the back foot up to meet the front one.
Every physical therapist on the internet teaches roughly that. What almost none of them tell you is which end to learn it from.
Learn it in reverse order. Start with step five on its own, the half-kneel to standing, and repeat only that until it’s easy. Then start from step four and do the last two steps together. Keep adding one step earlier in the sequence until you’re doing the whole thing from lying down. Researchers call this backward chaining, and that’s the version the trial used.
So they ran it against the obvious alternative:
Sixty-one people were split into two groups. One group practiced the floor rise in reverse order, five weekly sessions of 20 minutes. The other group watched a demonstration video and talked about it. Rise time from lying on the back dropped from 13.1 seconds to 7.1 seconds in the group that practiced. Afterwards 100 percent of them could get up from lying on their backs, against 63 percent of the group that only watched. Nobody was hurt.
Seeley SC, Skelton DA, Tan CW, Stansfield B, Dall PM. Comparing the impact of active floor-rise training with video demonstration on fear of falling and independent floor-rise ability in older adults living in the community: a pilot cluster randomised controlled trial. Age and Ageing. 2026;55(3):afag064. PMID 41894198
Look at what that trial compares. Both groups saw the technique. Only one group did it.
Five sessions of twenty minutes, spread across five weeks, adds up to under two hours of practice. It nearly halved the time.
The trial ran inside existing exercise classes with 61 people, 49 of whom finished, so it’s a pilot rather than a large trial. But the effect is big enough and cheap enough that we practice it with my clients anyway.
One more result deserves attention, because it cuts against what you’d expect. Fear of falling didn’t change. Practice made them able within five weeks, but the fear hadn’t dropped yet. Work on the ability and let the confidence follow it.
Use Your Hands
The internet decided somewhere in the last few years that getting up without touching your hands down is the standard you should hold yourself to. Videos score you on it.
I’d like to retire that idea.
Rising without your hands is one movement, done one way, and all it tells you is whether you can do it that way.
Plenty of strong, capable women put a hand down because it’s the sensible way to move your body through that range. Plenty of people who can do it without hands are unremarkable in every other physical respect.
A woman in an online forum for runners over 50 put it about as well as it can be put: “Getting up not using my hands is not a priority.”
She’s right. Put your hands down. Use the coffee table. The goal is to get up off the floor when you want to, at the speed you want to, as many times as you want to. Nobody needs to know whether your palm touched the carpet on the way.
Needing more support than you used to is a real signal, though. It means you’ve lost strength, and the answer is to build it back rather than to hold yourself to a stricter rule about your hands.
Practice and Strength Do Different Jobs
Every page and video on this topic stops at the technique. Technique is worth having, and the trial above proves it cuts the rise time.
But practice alone has a ceiling, and the ceiling is how much force your hips and legs can produce. Raise that ceiling and the whole movement gets easier at every step, including the steps you never practiced.
Here’s what 121 trials say about that:
Researchers pooled every controlled trial of progressive strength training in older adults they could find, covering 6,700 people, with most of the training done two to three times a week at a high intensity. Strength went up substantially across 73 of those trials. Of all the everyday abilities they measured, getting out of a chair responded the most, and the effect there was moderate to large. Serious problems were rare, and none was reported as caused by the training.
Liu CJ, Latham NK. Progressive resistance strength training for improving physical function in older adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2009;(3):CD002759. PMID 19588334
Walking speed moved a little. Getting up moved a lot.
My clients train twice a week, which is the lower end of what those trials used. Two sessions drive the adaptation, and it’s a schedule people keep for years rather than weeks.
Power responds to training the same way strength does.
Here’s what happened when researchers ran that training with women only:
Sixty-three healthy women averaging 67.5 years lifted for 24 weeks at 75 to 85 percent of their one-repetition maximum. Peak power at the knee rose by 15.7 percent in the training-only group, and the time they needed to reach that peak fell by 11 percent. Their five-repetition sit-to-stand improved as well. A second training group that also changed their diet did better again on the power measures.
Edholm P, Strandberg E, Kadi F. Lower limb explosive strength capacity in elderly women: effects of resistance training and healthy diet. Journal of Applied Physiology. 2017;123(1):190-196. PMID 28473614
Note the load in that study. Seventy-five to 85 percent of a one-repetition maximum is “heavy” for the woman lifting it, and the average age in that room was 67. That’s the weight that moved peak power, and peak power is what gets you off the floor without a running commentary.
Five Exercises That Build the Strength Underneath
These load your hips and ankles, which is what the study above found the movement demands. Do them twice a week, two or three sets of each. Choose a weight where the last two repetitions are “appropriately challenging,” and add weight once those last two get easier:
- Split squat.
One foot forward, one foot back, lowering until your back knee is close to the floor. This is the half-kneel position from step four, loaded. Nothing else on the list transfers as directly. Eight repetitions per leg. - Step-up.
Step onto a box or a bench, drive through the front foot, and step down under control. One leg produces the force, exactly as it does when you rise from a half-kneel. Start at a height you can manage without pushing off the back foot. - Goblet squat.
Hold a dumbbell at your chest and sit back until your thighs are a little above parallel. This is your leg strength base, and it’s the exercise you’ll add the most weight to over a year. - Romanian deadlift.
This one belongs to your hips and hamstrings. Your hips do the most work in a floor rise, and this is the heaviest thing you’ll do all session. - Half-kneeling overhead press.
Press a dumbbell overhead from one knee. Your trunk holds you upright in the position you pass through on the way up, and it has to do that while your arm is loaded.
Two of those five put you in a half-kneel on purpose. The place where most women stall is the moment they have to commit their weight to a single front leg, so the answer is being strong in that exact position rather than working around it.
Sore or stiff knees don’t rule any of this out. Reducing the depth and slowing the descent lets you load the movement while your tolerance builds back up, which I’ve covered properly in exercising with knee pain after 50.
What to Do at Home
You can start today without any equipment, and the practice half of this works at home. Three things worth doing:
- Half-kneel to stand. Kneel on one knee with the other foot flat in front, then stand. Do five per side. Put a cushion under your down knee for the first week, and keep a chair beside you to be extra safe.
- Bodyweight split squat. Same position, lowering and rising without standing all the way up. Hold the back of a chair with one hand until you don’t need it.
- The whole sequence in reverse order. Go back to the five steps under “Getting Up Off the Floor, Step by Step” and start with step five on its own, the half-kneel to standing. Add one earlier step each week until you’re doing the whole thing from lying down.
Here’s the limit, and it’s the one every home workout page leaves out: You can make the exercise more challenging for a while by slowing the movement down, going deeper into the range, or shifting the work onto one leg.
But you run out of ways to do that. You can’t add five pounds to yourself the way you can add five pounds to a dumbbell, and muscle and power keep responding best to load that keeps climbing.
Practice at home, and get the strength work somewhere you can add weight.
What You Get Back
Women describe this loss in a very specific way, and it’s rarely about a fall. One woman in an online menopause forum wrote that what she missed was “not thinking twice about getting up off the floor,” and then listed taking the stairs two at a time and squatting down for something. The thing she wanted back was the not thinking about it.
The list is always the same when I ask. You want to garden for an hour without planning the exit. You want to get down on the carpet with a grandchild and stay there a while. You want the bottom shelf back, and the floor at a concert or a school event when that’s where the space is.
There’s a quieter cost that surprises people …
Avoiding the floor shrinks your training too. A woman on a weight loss forum wrote that getting up and down off the floor had become difficult enough that she was putting off her workouts because of it.
Plenty of the exercises in any home program start or finish on the ground, and dreading that part gives you a reason not to begin.
Get comfortable on the floor again and you get your workouts back, not just your garden.
What This Means For You
Work on the practice and the strength at the same time, and give it three months.
Practice the movement at home in reverse order, starting from the half-kneel and adding one earlier step each week, a few minutes at a time. The trial got its result in five sessions of twenty minutes. That’s twenty minutes a week to (literally) change your life.
Then train twice a week with weight that goes up over the months, on exercises that load your hips and ankles rather than only your knees.
Practice makes you smoother at the movement you rehearsed. Strength makes every version of it easier, including the ones you’ll meet by surprise on a slope, in a garden bed, or on somebody else’s living room floor. Do both.
Two related pieces go further into the strength side: hip and glute strength after 50, and single-leg exercises after 50.
Printable Workout Card
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The whole thing fits on one printable page. You get the five lifts with their sets and reps, the practice sequence laid out week by week, and six blank columns where you write the weight you used. That last part is what makes the weight go up.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it so hard to get up off the floor now?
Rising from the floor loads your hips and ankles harder than standing up from a chair does, through a much deeper range, and it needs that force delivered fairly quickly. Both hip strength and the speed you produce force fall away with age unless you train them. You can stand up from a dining chair a hundred times a day, but that never trains the hip and ankle strength a floor rise takes.
How do I get up off the floor with bad knees?
Put a cushion or a folded towel under your down knee and use furniture for support, which takes the pressure off that knee and lets your arms share the work. Roll to your side rather than sitting straight up. Sore knees usually improve with progressive loading rather than avoidance, so building strength through a comfortable range is the longer-term answer.
Should I be able to get up without using my hands?
No, and I’d ignore anyone who tells you otherwise. Rising without hands is one movement performed one way, and plenty of strong women choose to put a hand down because it’s the sensible way to move. Getting up when you want to, at the speed you want to, is the ability worth having.
How long does it take to get better at this?
The practice moves quickly. In one trial, five weekly 20-minute sessions took rise time from 13.1 seconds to 7.1 seconds. Strength takes longer, and the trials that measured real gains in power ran 24 weeks. Expect the movement to feel smoother within a month and the effort behind it to drop over several months.
Can I practice this at home?
Yes, and you should. Work the sequence in reverse order, starting with the half-kneel to standing and adding one earlier step each week. Keep a chair beside you at first. That covers the practice, and you’ll still want weight that increases for the strength.
Is this the same as balance training?
No, these are two different problems. Standing on one leg on a wobbly surface trains you to stand on a wobbly surface. Rising from the floor is a force problem, and the answer is the strength to produce that force through a deep range. Squats, split squats, step-ups and Romanian deadlifts build it. Wobble boards don’t.
Related Reading
- Hip and Glute Strength After 50
- Single-Leg Exercises for Balance After 50
- Is It Safe to Exercise with Knee Pain After 50?
- Muscle Loss After 50
→ Take the Strong After 50 Strength Scorecard: 15 questions, scored on the spot