What Causes Difficulty Getting Up From a Chair?

Difficulty getting up from a chair usually comes down to one or more of three things: not enough muscle force in your legs and hips, pain or stiffness in key joints, or a neurological condition that disrupts the coordination the movement requires. Standing up from a seated position is one of the most physically demanding tasks people perform dozens of times a day, and it draws on nearly every system in the lower body. Because so many systems have to work together, the list of conditions that can interfere is long and often overlapping.

Why Standing Up Is Harder Than It Looks

Getting out of a chair is not a single motion. Researchers who track the movement frame by frame describe it in stages: first your trunk leans forward, shifting your center of gravity over your feet while your hips are still on the seat. Then your hips leave the seat and your whole body rotates forward around the ankles. The third phase is where the most position change happens, as your hip joints drive your trunk upward. Finally your legs and trunk reach an upright position.¹ Each of these phases demands a different combination of strength, joint range of motion, and balance. If any one link in the chain is weak, the whole sequence slows down or fails.

The joints doing the heaviest lifting are the hips and knees. Studies measuring the torque needed for a normal-speed stand found that you need roughly 0.7 Nm of hip extension torque and 0.9 Nm of knee extension torque per kilogram of body weight just to complete the motion at an ordinary pace.² That may not sound like much, but for someone who has lost muscle mass, has a painful knee, or is recovering from surgery, those thresholds represent real barriers.

Muscle Weakness and Age-Related Decline

Loss of muscle strength is probably the single most common reason the sit-to-stand movement becomes difficult, especially with age. Your quadriceps, glutes, and hip extensors do the bulk of the work, and these muscle groups lose both mass and power as you get older. Research in people in their nineties found a strong relationship between lower-limb muscle power and how well they could stand from a chair, with a correlation of 0.80 between leg power output and peak power during the movement.³ When muscle quality drops enough, it shows up as slower, wobblier, and less controlled rising.

Sarcopenic obesity, where someone has both low muscle mass and excess body fat, compounds the problem. A study in older New Zealanders found that those with both sarcopenic obesity and osteoporosis at the hip scored the worst on chair-stand tests compared to other groups.⁴ The combination is particularly harsh because you have less muscle to generate force while carrying more weight that demands it.

People often assume this kind of weakness only affects the very old, but deconditioning after even a short hospital stay can produce the same effect at any age. Bed rest causes rapid muscle loss, and the legs suffer first. Hospitalized patients who lose leg strength have trouble with basic daily activities like getting in and out of a chair, and this can delay discharge or lead to a need for more support after going home.⁵

Knee and Hip Arthritis

Joint disease changes not just whether you can stand up, but how you do it. People with knee osteoarthritis instinctively shift weight away from the painful knee. Studies show they put about 10% more weight on the opposite leg compared to healthy controls, lean their trunk forward more, and tilt sideways toward the non-painful side.⁶ The stronger the pain, the longer the whole movement takes. These are not random adjustments; they are calculated trade-offs the body makes to protect the affected joint, and they happen automatically.

A meta-analysis pooling data across multiple studies confirmed that people with knee osteoarthritis generate substantially less knee extension force while standing up and compensate with greater trunk flexion, essentially bowing forward more to use their back and hip muscles to spare the knee.⁷ The workaround gets the job done, but it puts unusual stress on other joints and may eventually cause problems there too.

When obesity is added to knee osteoarthritis, the effect is worse than either alone. Researchers found that people who were both obese and had knee osteoarthritis showed significantly less range of motion at both the knee and hip than lean people with the same arthritis or healthy controls.⁸ The two conditions feed on each other: the extra weight accelerates joint damage, and the damaged joint makes it harder to be active enough to manage weight.

Hip osteoarthritis causes a different pattern. Before hip replacement, patients with hip osteoarthritis shifted their center of mass farther to one side and farther forward than healthy people, and these compensations persisted even a year after total hip replacement surgery.⁹ The persistence is worth noting: even after the damaged joint is replaced, the brain may continue using the old protective movement strategy for months.

Parkinson’s Disease

Rising from a chair is one of the tasks that people with Parkinson’s disease report struggling with earliest. The problem is twofold. First, Parkinson’s affects anticipatory postural control, the brain’s ability to shift the body’s center of gravity forward before the legs push off. Healthy people do this smoothly and unconsciously; in Parkinson’s disease, the preparatory hip flexion and forward weight shift are reduced, which means the legs have to generate more force from a worse starting position.¹⁰

Second, the movement itself is slower. Systematic review data show that people with Parkinson’s take longer to complete the stand, particularly during the phase between peak forward momentum and the moment the hips leave the seat.¹¹ This delay reflects bradykinesia, the characteristic slowness of movement in Parkinson’s. People with Parkinson’s also produce a smaller hip flexion torque and build that torque more slowly than healthy controls, even when their joints move through the same range of motion.¹²

When researchers looked specifically at which Parkinson’s symptoms best predicted trouble with the sit-to-stand movement, leg bradykinesia and hip extension weakness (measured as hip extension strength of 9 kg or less) were the two strongest predictors.¹³ That finding matters practically because it means targeted leg strengthening can address at least half of the problem, even while the neurological component remains.

Stroke and One-Sided Weakness

After a stroke, the affected side of the body contributes far less to standing up. Measurements of weight distribution through force plates show dramatic asymmetry: in one study, the weaker (paretic) leg bore an average of about 296 N while the stronger side bore about 458 N during chair rise.¹⁴ That means the stronger leg is doing roughly 50% more work, which is tiring and makes balance precarious.

The asymmetry starts even before the person lifts off the seat. A review of sit-to-stand research in people with hemiparesis found that weight-bearing was already uneven while thighs were still in contact with the chair, suggesting a deliberate pre-planned strategy rather than a reaction to instability mid-rise.¹⁵ The trunk also tends to lean toward the unaffected side. People with stroke who tried to stand symmetrically still made large errors in their perception of how much weight each side was actually bearing, indicating that the brain’s sense of body position is affected alongside raw strength.¹⁶

Dementia and Motor Planning

Getting out of a chair is not purely a strength task. It also requires the brain to plan the sequence, adjust timing, and coordinate body segments in the right order. In dementia, that cognitive component breaks down. People with dementia show disease-specific sit-to-stand movement disorders tied to difficulty integrating the cognitive aspects of motor planning into the physical action.¹⁷

Studies comparing people with Alzheimer’s disease to healthy older adults found that the Alzheimer’s group reduced their forward trunk lean and started moving upward earlier in the sequence, altering the higher-level spatial planning of the movement while the basic lower-level motor features remained intact.¹⁸ In practical terms, the muscles can still do the job, but the brain sends them a less efficient set of instructions. Caregivers may see this as hesitation or clumsiness rather than weakness, which can lead to confusion about what kind of help the person actually needs.

Dizziness and Orthostatic Hypotension

Some people can physically stand up just fine but feel lightheaded or unsteady the moment they do, which makes them reluctant to try. Orthostatic hypotension, a drop in blood pressure upon standing, is one of the most common causes of this. When it happens acutely, it is usually caused by medications (blood pressure pills, antidepressants, prostate drugs), dehydration, or blood loss. When it is chronic, it often stems from changes in the way the nervous system regulates blood pressure, particularly in older adults and people with diabetes or neurological diseases.¹⁹

Vestibular disorders, problems with the inner-ear balance system, can produce a similar sensation. People with vestibular dysfunction perform worse on timed sit-to-stand tests, and vestibular rehabilitation programs use the sit-to-stand test as a way to track improvement.²⁰ The difficulty here is not about generating enough force to rise; it is about the brain’s ability to keep you oriented once you are upright.

Breathing Problems and COPD

Standing from a chair demands a brief surge in energy output, and for people with chronic lung disease, that surge can leave them winded. In chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), timed sit-to-stand performance correlates with self-reported breathlessness, activity limitation, and lack of energy. The strongest predictors of poor performance were age, lung function (measured by how much air you can blow out in one second), and overall symptom burden.²¹ People with more severe COPD performed worse, and the relationship was consistent enough that researchers consider the sit-to-stand test a useful way to gauge how limited someone’s daily functioning has become.

How Older Adults Compensate, and When That Fails

Healthy aging does not suddenly make standing up impossible. Instead, the body compensates. Older adults who are at risk of falls tend to lean their trunks forward more than younger people and those with good balance, using exaggerated forward momentum to make up for weaker leg muscles.²² These compensatory strategies work up to a point. But as muscle and joint capacity decline further, the margin for compensation narrows. Researchers frame this as a “capacity reserve” problem: the body has redundancy built in, and it is only when enough systems deteriorate simultaneously that the task actually becomes impossible.²³

This is why the sit-to-stand test has become one of the go-to clinical assessments for older adults. Being unable to complete five stands in a row is more strongly associated with disability in daily activities than it is with fall risk alone.²⁴ Reference values have now been established from a pooled analysis of over 45,000 participants across 14 European countries, giving clinicians age- and sex-specific benchmarks.²⁵ If your time on this test is significantly slower than the reference for your age group, it can flag problems before they become crises.

Chair Height, Armrests, and Quick Environmental Fixes

One of the simplest and most underappreciated factors is the chair itself. Seat height has a dramatic effect on how much force your knees and hips need to produce. When researchers compared rising from a standard-height seat to rising from a higher seat, the maximum knee torque dropped by over 60% with the taller seat.²⁶ Think about that: just raising the seat eliminates more than half the knee demand. For someone with knee arthritis or quad weakness, this alone can be the difference between independent and dependent.

Armrests offer a similar advantage. Using armrests to push off significantly reduces both hip and knee moments regardless of armrest height or hand position. In one study, the combination of high armrests and strong arm push reduced the peak hip torque from 39 Nm to 17 Nm and the peak knee torque from 83 Nm to 28 Nm.²⁷ For someone struggling to stand, choosing a firm chair with armrests and adding a seat cushion to raise the height are low-cost interventions that make a real difference. Soft, deep couches with no armrests are the worst-case scenario.

What Resistance Training Can and Cannot Do

Strength training is the intervention with the broadest evidence for improving sit-to-stand ability. A Cochrane systematic review of progressive resistance training in older adults found a moderate to large effect on the ability to get out of a chair across 11 trials.²⁸ The same review found modest improvements in walking speed. The key word is “progressive,” meaning the resistance increases over time as the person gets stronger, rather than staying at a fixed light weight.

The catch is that resistance training addresses the muscle component and cannot fix everything. If your difficulty rising is primarily about joint damage, neurological coordination, or blood pressure regulation, strengthening your quads and glutes will help but will not eliminate the problem. For Parkinson’s disease, the evidence suggests leg strengthening can offset some of the weakness but does nothing directly for bradykinesia. For stroke, building strength in the weaker leg helps, but the brain’s impaired sense of weight distribution has to be retrained separately.

Vascular Disease and Unexpected Connections

Some conditions that cause chair-rise difficulty are not obvious. Peripheral artery disease, where narrowed arteries reduce blood flow to the legs, can quietly sap leg endurance and strength. Patients with arteriosclerosis obliterans (a form of peripheral artery disease) showed significantly longer times on the five-times-sit-to-stand test compared to controls, and the test performed well as a screening tool for the condition.²⁹ Similarly, lumbar spinal stenosis, where the spinal canal narrows and compresses nerves in the lower back, worsens sit-to-stand performance in proportion to its severity.³⁰ In both cases, the person may not realize the underlying cause because the symptoms creep in gradually, and they attribute the difficulty to “just getting older.”

This is one reason clinicians value the sit-to-stand test so highly. A person who has trouble rising from a chair may think it is just a minor inconvenience, but it can be an early signal of conditions affecting the muscles, nerves, joints, heart, lungs, or blood vessels. If the difficulty is new or worsening, it is worth mentioning to a doctor rather than assuming it is a normal part of aging that nothing can be done about. More often than not, something can.