A wall sit is either an incredible exercise or a form of punishment. I would argue that if you want to age well and age gracefully in New York City, you must learn to like them and, more importantly, do them regularly.

First, what is a wall sit? How do you do them? They are described in Self magazine as follows:

“So what exactly is the wall sit? The wall sit exercise is exactly as it sounds: Imagine sitting on a box in front of a wall with your back flat against said wall. Now, think about taking the box away. The muscles in your legs need to fire to keep your body steady as you hold that seated position—that’s a wall sit.”

https://www.self.com/story/wall-sit-exercis

How long to hold a wall sit appears to be a matter of debate. I have read 30 seconds and also 2 minutes. I have my timer set for 90 seconds. The first 15 seconds are fine, and then I begin to feel it in my quadriceps. Only another 75 seconds to go! Yikes!

You might wonder why building one’s quads are so useful for living in NYC, especially for aging well and aging gracefully. Let’s think first about the subway. Your quadricep muscles are absolutely essential if you want to get up from a seated position to get out of the train. That’s especially true if you’re not sitting at the end of a row with the benefit of a pole next to you. It’s never a good idea to grab onto the shoulder of the stranger sitting next to you for leverage.

It’s also important to be able to walk up stairs and keep up with the pace of those ahead and behind you. If you’re one of those people who is slow to climb stairs, you will hear plenty of expletives muttered behind you. That is especially true if the stairs are single lane in each direction. In particular, I can think of the subway stairs on the Upper West Side for the #1, 2 and 3 subway trains.

In addition to getting out of subway seats and climbing stairs, strong quad muscles are a great benefit for getting out of chairs and banquette seats in restaurants, getting up from low toilets and helping to stabilize your knees. Personally, the discomfort in my right knee has pretty much disappeared after the past 4 weeks of wall sits.

The other amazing benefit is that doing wall sits presumably helps to lower your blood pressure. Many recent articles discuss this, but here it is from the source of all aging well recommendations, the AARP: https://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-2024/best-exercise-to-lower-blood-pressure.html

Nobody says they’re easy to do. And, obviously, check with your doctor whether you can or should begin to do them. However, if you can include a wall sit in your daily exercise routine, you will find it easier to age well and more gracefully in New York City. At least, it will be easier to get out of the subway train so you don’t get caught in the closing doors.