Sit-and-Reach by Age and Gender: How Do You Compare?

It may seem odd for an American publication to lean on a Canadian survey, so here is the short version. The United States does not have a national adult sit-and-reach reference. The federal government's big physical-exam survey, NHANES, has run fitness testing only once, as a separate study of young people.

That study, the NHANES National Youth Fitness Survey, was conducted in 2012 and covered children ages 3 to 15. Nothing comparable exists for adults in their 40s, 50s or 60s.

Canada does have one. The Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS) sends trained staff to measure a nationally representative sample of people in mobile clinics, and the sit-and-reach is part of its fitness battery. In 2019, a team at Statistics Canada led by Matt Hoffmann turned the 2016-2017 round of that survey into sex- and age-specific percentile values for Canadians aged 6 to 69.

A few things make this set worth trusting over a random chart. The measurements were taken in person, by staff following one written protocol, rather than self-reported. The researchers applied survey weights so the results describe the general population rather than just the volunteers who showed up. And they smoothed the curves across ages with an established statistical method (GAMLSS, an extension of the LMS approach widely used for growth charts), which is why neighboring age bands change gradually instead of jumping around.

If the benchmark-by-age idea is new to you, this piece follows the same approach as our look at grip strength by age, which relied on a US reference set because one existed for that test.

The tables below come directly from Table 3 of the Statistics Canada percentile report. All values are in centimeters, measured on a box where a toe touch equals 26 cm.

One detail matters before you look. The published table reports the 5th, 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, 60th, 70th, 80th, 90th and 95th percentiles. It does not report a 25th or 75th percentile, so you won't find those columns here. Some charts online show "25th" and "75th" values credited to this survey; those are estimates squeezed between the published columns, not numbers the survey released.

Men, Ages 20 to 69 (cm, toe touch = 26)

Women, Ages 20 to 69 (cm, toe touch = 26)

What the Table Shows

The easiest way into these numbers is the toe line. Because a toe touch scores exactly 26 cm on this setup, you can read the table as "how far short of the toes, or how far past them, does a typical person reach?"

For men, the median sits short of the toes in every adult band. At 20-24 the middle man reaches 24.6 cm, about 1.4 cm shy. By 40-44 he's at 23.3 cm, and by 65-69 he's at 20.3 cm, a little under 6 cm short. Put another way, a man in his 40s or 50s who just brushes his toes is reaching farther than more than half of the men his age in the survey.

For women, the median reaches past the toes in every adult band, never dropping below 28.8 cm. A woman in her 50s who just touches her toes sits at roughly the 40th percentile for her age.

The shape of the age curve differs by sex, too. The men's median slips 4.3 cm between the youngest and oldest bands, and it keeps sliding steadily all the way through. The women's median slips only 2.2 cm, and from 50-54 onward it barely moves at all: 29.1, 28.8, 28.8, 28.9. The gap between the sexes at the median widens from 6.5 cm in the early 20s to 8.6 cm in the late 60s, which means the median woman aged 65-69 out-reaches the median man aged 20-24.

These are snapshots of different age groups measured at the same time, not the same people followed over decades. So the table tells you where your number sits among people your age today; it doesn't forecast how anyone's reach will change.

A similar split between sexes shows up in other at-home benchmarks, such as single-leg balance by age, which is one more reason a combined chart can mislead.

Here is the part most charts skip. A sit-and-reach number is only meaningful relative to where the scale starts, and different setups start it in very different places.

The Canadian survey used a purpose-built box called a flexometer. You sit with the soles of your feet pressed flat against its front face, and the scale on top is arranged so that reaching exactly to your toes reads 26 cm. Anything past the toes climbs above 26; anything short falls below it.

The classic American home version, from the YMCA's fitness testing manual, uses a yardstick on the floor instead. A protocol reproduced by the NIH-supported PhenX Toolkit describes laying the yardstick between your legs with the zero end toward you, putting tape across the 15-inch mark, and starting with your heels at the 14-inch mark because legs tend to creep forward during the reach. You get three tries and record the best to the nearest inch.

Notice what that does. On the yardstick, your feet sit at roughly 14 to 15 inches, which is about 35.6 to 38.1 cm. On the survey's box, your feet sit at 26 cm. Same reach, same person, different number.

Protocol Panel: Which Table Goes With Which Setup

Even two boxes can disagree. The Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology norms reprinted in the ACSM guidelines carry a note that boxes with the zero point set at 23 cm need 3 cm subtracted before the table applies.

Researchers flag the same issue in general terms: a test catalog from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology points out that some scales treat the sole of the foot as zero, giving plus and minus scores, while others start below the sole so every score comes out positive.

A Rough Conversion, and Why It Stays Rough

If you've already measured with a yardstick, the geometry gives you a ballpark. Because the feet sit at about 35.6 to 38.1 cm on the yardstick and at 26 cm on the survey box, a yardstick score converted to centimeters runs roughly 10 to 12 cm (about 4 to 5 inches) higher than the same reach would read on the box.

Here's what that looks like in practice. Say a 52-year-old woman reaches 13 inches on a yardstick. That's 33.0 cm, which would appear to place her between the 60th and 70th percentile in the women's 50-54 row. Take 10 to 12 cm off, though, and her reach lands around 21 to 23 cm, closer to the 20th to 30th percentile. Same reach, very different story.

No published study validates a precise crosswalk between the two setups, and small details (how far the legs creep, whether your hands slide on the floor or over a box top) shift the result. So treat that 10 to 12 cm as a sense-check, not a conversion factor. The cleanest comparison always comes from measuring on the setup that matches the table.

You don't need a lab flexometer to get close to the survey's geometry. What matters is that your soles rest against a vertical face and that the point directly above that face reads 26 cm.

Here is what the survey itself did, which you can mirror as closely as your space allows:

• Warm-up. Before testing, participants sat in a modified hurdle position and held a gentle stretch on each leg twice, alternating legs, for 20 seconds each time.
• Position. Participants sat on the floor, shoes off, legs fully extended, with the soles of both feet flat against the front of the box.
• The reach. They reached forward as far as possible toward the toes while keeping the knees straight.
• Scoring. Each person had two valid trials, and the better score was recorded to the nearest 0.1 cm.

A home version usually starts with something solid and square: a sturdy box, a low step or a stack of heavy books pushed against a wall so it can't slide. A ruler or tape measure laid across the top, running toward you, provides the scale. The key adjustment is lining the 26 cm mark up exactly with the front face where your soles will press, so that the part of the ruler hanging back toward you reads from about 0 to 25 cm and the part out over the box reads 26 and up.

A second person makes a real difference. They can watch that your knees stay flat, note where your fingertips stop, and read the ruler at eye level. Reaching slowly and holding the end position briefly makes the reading easier; a quick bounce tends to add a centimeter that isn't really there. Keeping your hands together, one on top of the other, stops one hand from sneaking ahead.

If you'd like a few more tests that use the same kind of household setup, our roundup of simple at-home fitness tests covers several others.

Every reference table describes a particular group of people, and it helps to know who was in this one.

The survey covered Canadians living in the ten provinces. It did not include people living in the three territories, on reserves and Aboriginal settlements, members of the Canadian Forces, people living in institutions, or people in certain remote areas. The measurements were taken in 2016 and 2017, and the adult tables stop at age 69.

Not everyone who took part did the fitness tests, either. According to a later Statistics Canada analysis of fitness trends, people were screened out of fitness testing for reasons including affirmative answers on the Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire (PAR-Q), medications that ruled testing out, certain acute or chronic conditions, high blood pressure at the visit, an elevated heart rate, or pregnancy beyond 12 weeks. So the table describes people who passed that screen, and it makes no statement about anyone who didn't.

That same analysis also adds some useful context about timing. Men's average sit-and-reach scores dropped between the 2007-2009 survey round and the 2016-2017 round, from 25.1 to 22.3 cm among men aged 40 to 59, while women's scores held steady at roughly 29 to 30 cm. In other words, older charts built on earlier data may set a higher bar for men than today's population actually shows.

This is the same kind of disclosure you'll find in our walking speed by age benchmark, where the reference group also shapes what a percentile means.

The Canadian tables stop at 69. For older adults, the most widely used reference comes from the Senior Fitness Test developed by Roberta Rikli and Jessie Jones, and it uses a different test entirely: the chair sit-and-reach.

Instead of sitting on the floor, you sit near the front edge of a chair about 17 inches high. One foot stays flat on the floor; the other leg extends forward with the heel down and the ankle bent at about 90 degrees. You reach toward the toes of the extended leg, and the score is the distance between your fingertips and your toes. Touching the toes scores zero, falling short gives a minus number, and reaching past gives a plus number, all in inches.

Because both the posture and the zero point differ, these numbers can't be placed on the floor-test tables above, or the other way around. The normal ranges published by Jones and Rikli, which span the 25th to 75th percentile, look like this:

These ranges come from community-dwelling adults aged 60 to 94. The original normative sample, described in a University of Missouri Geriatric Toolkit summary, numbered 7,183 people and excluded anyone who had been advised not to exercise, or who had congestive heart failure, joint pain, chest pain, dizziness or angina during exercise, or blood pressure above 160/100. As with the Canadian table, the ranges describe people with none of those.

The same test battery produced the reference ranges in our 30-second chair stand benchmark, if you'd like to see another piece of it.

Once you have a score measured on the matching setup, reading it is simple. Find your age band and sex, then look along the row for the two columns your number falls between.

Say you're a man of 47 and you reach 25 cm. In the 45-49 row, the median is 22.7 cm and the 60th percentile is 25.3 cm, so you sit just under the 60th percentile. More than half of the men your age in the survey reached less far than you did, and roughly 40 percent reached farther.

Or say you're a woman of 58 and you reach 23 cm. In the 55-59 row, the 30th percentile is 22.6 cm and the 40th is 25.8 cm, so you fall just above the 30th. The 40th percentile isn't shown in the table above, but it is in the full published version, which is worth a look if your number lands in one of the wider gaps.

That's the whole claim. A percentile describes where your reach sits among people of your age and sex who were measured the same way. It isn't a grade, and this reference makes no statement about what any particular number means for you beyond that position.

If you enjoy seeing where you land on these kinds of charts, our resting heart rate percentiles by age uses the same percentile framing for a very different measurement.