Five times sit-to-stand takes under a minute, needs a chair without arms and a watch, and tells you more about an older patient's trajectory than most of the blood tests ordered at the same visit. Ask the patient to fold their arms across their chest and stand fully and sit fully five times, as fast as they safely can, timing from 'go' to the final seated position.
What it gives you is lower limb strength and balance in one number, and — crucially — a baseline. A single reading is a snapshot; the same test at the next review is a trajectory, and a trajectory is what tells you whether a frailty intervention is working or whether decline is accelerating.
Do it in the consulting room rather than referring for it. The commonest reason an older patient has no functional measurement in their record is that the test was thought of as something a physiotherapist does. Record the time, the date and whether they used their arms; the last of those is the detail people omit and it makes the numbers incomparable.
- Arms folded across the chest, five full stands from a chair without arms, timed from go to final sit
- Record the time, the date, and explicitly whether arms were used
- Repeat at each review — the change over time is the useful information, not the single value
- Stop the test and record the reason if the patient cannot complete it; inability is itself a finding
- Do it yourself in the room rather than referring; a referred test usually never happens
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