Can you stand on one leg for 10 seconds? What the study actually found

The study followed 1,702 adults aged 51 to 75, about two-thirds of them men, who were assessed between 2008 and 2020. Each person was asked to stand on one leg for 10 seconds with their eyes open, the free foot placed against the back of the other lower leg and the arms by the sides. They had up to three attempts.

20.4% of the group could not complete the 10 seconds. The researchers then followed everyone for a median of seven years and recorded who died.

The finding is about passing or failing at one threshold. It does not tell you whether 30 seconds is better than 15, or whether 11 seconds is meaningfully safer than 9. Ten seconds is the line the researchers chose to test.

During follow-up, 17.5% of the people who failed the test died, against 4.6% of those who passed. Some of that gap could come from other differences between the two groups, such as age or illness, which is why the researchers adjusted for them.

After adjusting for age, sex, body mass index and existing illnesses, the hazard ratio was 1.84 (95% confidence interval 1.23–2.78). In words: at any point during follow-up, people who failed were dying at about 1.84 times the rate of people who passed, once those factors were accounted for. The interval means the data fit anything from about 1.2 to 2.8 times.

Adding the test to a model built on established risk factors also improved how well that model predicted who died. For a test that takes under a minute and needs no equipment, that is a useful result.

It is observational. People who cannot balance for 10 seconds may differ in ways the adjustment does not capture. The authors themselves note that they had no data on recent falls or physical activity, two obvious candidates.

It does not show that training your balance lowers your risk of dying. No trial has tested that. The closest randomised evidence is about falls, not death: in trials of people aged 60 and over, balance and functional exercise reduced the rate of falls by 24% (Cochrane, 2019).

The study also reported failure rates for each five-year age band. We have seen those figures only in a press release, not in the paper’s own table, so we do not repeat them here. We have not read the full text of the paper either; the figures above come from its abstract.

Closing your eyes makes standing on one leg much harder. In Springer’s 2007 study of 549 healthy adults, the average best-of-three time with eyes open was 41.2 s at 50–59 and 32.1 s at 60–69, close to that test’s 45-second cap. With eyes closed, the same age groups averaged 8.3 s and 4.4 s.

So "10 seconds" means very different things depending on the version. Springer’s eyes-open averages suggest most healthy people in their fifties clear 10 seconds with room to spare. Holding 10 seconds with eyes closed is above the average for that decade. Someone who manages 6 seconds with eyes closed has not "failed" the 2022 test, because they never took it.

There is outcome evidence for eyes-closed balance, from a different study. In a British birth cohort tested at 53, people unable to do an eyes-closed one-leg stance at all had 9.61 times the mortality of the best fifth over the next 13 years, and the lowest fifth had 2.53 times. Those are associations too, and the "unable" group was small and included people who were unwell when tested.

A meta-analysis of physical capability and mortality could not pool the balance studies, because each measured balance differently. All five that it found linked poorer balance with higher mortality.

If you want to try the 2022 test, the protocol is short: eyes open, arms by your sides, the free foot against the back of the standing lower leg, up to three attempts, 10 seconds. Stand next to a wall or counter. A result is a benchmark, not a diagnosis, and this is not medical advice; if your balance has changed suddenly, ask a clinician.

Longstanding does not use this test. Its single-leg stand is eyes closed, arms crossed over the chest, the raised foot near but not touching the standing ankle, best of three, capped at 45 seconds. That is Springer’s protocol, and the app scores your time against Springer’s averages for your age. Springer published averages only, so the spread around each one, which turns your time into a percentile, is our estimate, and the app says so.

Because the protocols differ, the app never shows the 10-second mortality finding next to your eyes-closed result, and neither does this site. Doing so would compare a time from one test with a threshold from another.

The more useful number is your own trend. Re-tested each quarter on the same protocol, an eyes-closed time shows whether your balance is holding, which a single pass or fail cannot.