Remember the inverse DOES NOT hold. If you train to do 180 second one leg stands you aren't like increasing your survivability.
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One additional note though,
> Deaths from unintentional injuries are the seventh leading cause of death among older adults (1), and falls account for the largest percentage of those deaths.
If you have ever tried meditation and found it physically too painful, I highly recommend you try a tai chi class. I found it quite easy to turn the warmups into standing meditation, having failed many times before.
1. As a child I drew bad attention regularly, but genes and life choices have put me into a privileged place. It took walking to lunch with coworkers through a “bad” neighborhood for this to really hit home. Nobody was going to bother me, but I’d seen other people get bothered, and it hit me that nobody bothered them only because I was walking in front of them. It certainly could be the case that tai chi helps you with such things, but that was not so for most of my fellow students, and certainly not for some of the bigger guys.
The body mechanics of Chen is more obsessed with avoiding locked joints, and when I see videos of people who make me want to complain, it’s either Yang or someone who has split off from Chen more recently.
The legend of Yang Style is that it was started by one of the first outsiders ever allowed to study at Chen village. As with most things Eastern, the early expats we’nt always representative of the way things were done back in China.
You’re right about the sweat. It’s as hard a workout as you make it. My sifu joked once, “this is difficult at the beginning but don’t worry, as you progress it will get harder.” The interesting thing is laugh response. When you don’t know how on earth you’re going to hold this pose, people end up laughing nervously.
Pro tips for anyone thinking of dropping into a class: I highly, highly recommend starting the next morning with as vigorous a walk as you can manage. Even a brief power walk will blow a lot of the lactic acid out of muscles you aren’t used to using. And you are going to fart. Everyone goes through it at first. You are going to engage your core in ways you never have before, and some of that pressure is going to escape. Maybe avoid spicy foods the day before though.
I'd hope so if you are learning tai chi.
Tai chi is up close, and most adults who don’t want to get arrested aren’t likely to escalate past shoving or maybe one swing. It’s very good for that level of altercation. But like every other art, if you’re being mugged just give them your damn wallet.
My first trip on a bird scooter confirmed this.
This depends on the exact nature of the correlation between the survival and the "one leg stand up time" (OLSUT).
Even if we treat the second as a symptom of some debilitating, death causing disease, say cancer or heart ischemia then it is plausible that with stronger legs one will succumb to such malady a bit later.
More likely OLSUT is a more reliable indicator of a physical activity of a person than a questionaries directly asking for it. Unless cornered even alcoholics seldom confess drinking in excess. Sedentary persons probably do not divulge that they have not walk 2km a day in a last year or so.
Last but not least, as mentioned by many above: OLSUT can lower the risk of falls. And with 70+ falls -> broken bones -> bed -> pneumonias and/or thrombosis.
It might be that one legged balance doesn't improve 'balance' and so doesn't improve your health outcomes. Or 'balance' is irrelevant, and it's just that 'fitness' means you're less winded at the top of the steps, and so you're less likely to fall down at the top.
I'm gunna need a citation on that one. Training you balance is likely to increase your overall balance. Like, by definition. If you can stand on one leg well, then you have the muscles and the equilibrium to balance yourself. Therefore you are less likely to fall.
I'm saying that this experiment:
1. Does not define 'balance'
2. Does not show that the test they applied predicts or correlates with 'balance'
3. Does not show that 'balance' causes good health outcomes.
Perhaps 50 years of dance/yoga/gymnastics/core strength/martial arts leads to both fewer falls and greater 1-leg stance duration. A much shorter course of balance training much later in life might be insufficient to replicate the same benefits.