Standing Up Takes Longer Than You Think: Personal Safety While Seated

Most personal safety advice assumes you are on your feet. Keep your distance. Step back. Walk away. All of it is sound, and all of it was written standing up.

Now count your day. A working shift at a desk. The metro from Kartal into the city. Dinner at a restaurant, a first coffee with someone you have only messaged before, a hospital waiting room, the passenger seat of a car, a classroom. For most adults, the larger part of the waking day is spent sitting down, and almost none of the advice is written for that.

This is not a warning. There is nothing dangerous about sitting in a cafe. The point is narrower and far more useful: a chair quietly removes several of the options your other safety habits depend on, and getting them back costs about a second. Knowing where that second goes is worth more than any technique.

What a chair actually takes away

Standing, your feet are underneath your centre of mass. You can step in any direction immediately, and stepping is nearly the whole of good self-defense: it makes distance, and distance makes time.

Seated, three things change at once.

• Your centre of mass sits behind your feet, over the chair rather than over your base. Before you can go anywhere, you have to move it forward.
• Your legs are folded and your hip flexors are shortened. The muscles that would carry you away from something are already in their weakest position.
• Your exits are blocked by furniture. A table, a chair back, the person beside you on the bus, the table leg your foot is tucked behind.

None of that is dramatic. It is geometry, and geometry is honest.

The two halves of standing up

Sport science calls getting out of a chair the sit-to-stand movement, and it is one of the most closely studied movements in the body, mostly by people working with older adults and rehabilitation patients. It has two distinct phases.

First, momentum transfer. You lean your trunk forward until your centre of mass travels out over your feet. Nothing about you rises during this phase. You are only going forward.

Second, extension. Knees and hips straighten, and you come up.

The first half is the part people forget, and it is the part a chair can make expensive. Sink into a deep sofa with your feet out in front of you and you cannot lean far enough forward to get over your feet at all, so you have to draw your feet back first: a movement before the movement. A low stool, a bucket car seat, a soft armchair, a bag strap looped behind your back, crossed legs. Every one of them adds a fraction to a movement that already takes roughly a second for a healthy adult, and longer for most people past sixty.

Nobody is going to make that second disappear. So the answer is not to practise standing up faster. It is to spend less on the first half, and to notice earlier.

Sitting so that leaving stays cheap

None of this requires vigilance, and vigilance is not something anyone can sustain anyway. These are habits. You set them once, and then you sit down and enjoy your evening.

• Put one foot slightly back, under the front edge of the chair. On its own this removes most of the first phase, and it costs you nothing.
• Sit forward on the seat rather than sunk into the back of it when you are somewhere unfamiliar, or with someone you do not know well.
• Uncross your legs if your attention sharpens for any reason at all. You will usually turn out to be wrong about the reason, and being wrong will have cost you nothing.
• Keep your bag on your lap or between your feet rather than hooked over the chair back. A bag anchored to the furniture anchors you to the furniture.
• Take the seat with a view of the door if it happens to be free. Not to keep watch. Just so you are not the last person in the room to notice something entirely ordinary.

The table is your distance, not your obstacle

If a conversation across a table turns uncomfortable, the strong instinct is to lean in: to be heard, or because you are angry, or because you want to settle it here and now. Do the opposite. Sit back. The table already is the distance you would be trying to create if you were standing, and it is more reliable than footwork because you do not have to maintain it.

You can do a great deal from a seat. You can lower your voice, or raise it. You can say plainly that you are not comfortable and that you are going to leave. You can catch the eye of the staff, who in a cafe or a restaurant are the most useful resource in the building and are usually glad to be asked. You can call 112. Standing up is itself a signal, and there are moments when staying seated and speaking calmly is the better move.

But if you decide to leave, leave. Do not negotiate your way to the door. Stand, pick up your bag, and go, and let the conversation stay unfinished.

What training gives you here, and what it does not

Let me be plain about this, because a lot of self-defense marketing is not. Karate does not teach you to fight from a chair, and a few months of classes will not let anyone win a violent confrontation. Training reduces risk. It does not remove it, and no article can promise you safety.

What consistent training does give you is smaller and real.

• Leg strength and hip mobility, which is exactly what the sit-to-stand movement is built from. Standing up and sitting down without using your hands is one of the least glamorous and most useful things you can do at home.
• Rehearsal. If you have come up off the floor and out of seiza a few hundred times in class, standing up under stress is not a new problem for your body.
• Calibrated confidence. People who train tend to overestimate themselves less. Knowing what you can and cannot do is itself a safety skill.

Adrenaline takes fine motor control away and leaves gross movement behind. Standing up is gross movement. That is genuinely good news, because it is one of the few things that survives intact.

One habit to take away

One foot back. That is the whole thing.

Next time you sit down somewhere new, slide one foot under the chair. It takes no attention, nobody can see you do it, and it deletes the slow half of the slowest thing your body has to do.

Train with us in Kartal

At Kartal Karate Academy we teach children's karate, adult karate, self-defense and conditioning at Yakacık Spor Kulübü, Spor Cd. No:4, Cumhuriyet Mahallesi, 34876 Kartal, İstanbul, with Sensei Behzad Yaghoubian and Sensei Homa Yaghoubian, International Karate Champions. We are open Monday to Saturday, 09:00 to 21:00, and the first class is free.

Come and watch a session from the side of the mat, or book the free trial at karatekartal.fit/en/register. You can also reach us on +90 501 366 56 30 or +90 544 373 74 79. In an emergency in Turkey, the number is 112.