When you sit in a chair, lift a package off the floor or climb a flight of stairs, your body is doing some form of squatting, hinging or lunging. But just because you perform these movements every day doesn’t mean you’re doing them correctly. Whether you round your back while lifting or overload your knees when you stand up, repeatedly moving with poor form can lead to pain and injury.
Training these six fundamental movements — hinge, squat, lunge, push, pull and rotation — can help you accomplish daily tasks more easily and without pain as you age. Similar to a musician practicing their scales, mastering the basics can help you expand your range of motion, said Beth Lewis, a movement and exercise specialist based in New York City.
Through procedural memory, you learn and store movements to perform them without thinking about each step. That’s what allows you to hop on a bike and start pedaling, but it can also cause you to compromise your form hundreds of times a day without noticing.
There are a few versions of the fundamental movements framework, but the idea behind each one is the same: to build functional fitness by mimicking the motions you use for everyday tasks. Each of the exercises below, which you can easily train at home or in the gym, corresponds with a key movement pattern that you use in daily life.
Overview
Time: 12 minutes
Intensity: Low
What You’ll Need
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Light or medium resistance band
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A light dumbbell or kettlebell (choose a weight that feels challenging for the last 15 seconds of each exercise, but you should still be able to maintain your form)
How Often
If you don’t currently do any strength training, begin with three days per week and progress to daily over time. You can also complete one set of this routine as a warm-up for other forms of exercise.
Adjust For You
Beginner: Chris Flores, a trainer based in New Jersey, recommends doing each movement for 45 seconds with 20 to 30 seconds of rest between each set, focusing on maintaining proper form.
Advanced: Once that feels easy, you can progress to three to four sets of each exercise for 45 seconds.
Hinge
Your hips are a ball-and-socket joint, allowing for a wide range of motion while providing stability. That’s important for daily tasks like picking your kids or bags of groceries up off the ground. Mr. Flores said he often sees clients collapse forward with their chest, instead of moving their hips back, which can add stress on the lower back.
Exercise: Body weight good morning
Stand with your feet hip-width apart and gently rest your hands on the back of your head. Maintaining a flat back, push your hips back, allowing your knees to bend slightly, and lower your torso until it is nearly parallel to the ground. Pause, then slowly rise back to standing.
Advanced: Hold a dumbbell or kettlebell against your chest. If you tend to arch your spine, the weight will pull your shoulders forward at the start of the movement, Ms. Lewis said. Use that feedback to pull your shoulders back and maintain a flat back.
Squat
Whenever you sit or stand up, your body is performing a squat. If you feel knee pain, low back pain or a pinch in the hip, you may be starting this movement incorrectly or you may have a muscular imbalance, meaning a muscle on one side of the body is tighter, weaker or smaller than the muscle on the opposite side.
“My first red flag with the squat is the arches of the feet collapsing,” said Mr. Flores. This can indicate that the knees and ankles will collapse inward as well, which can lead to added stress on the knees and compromised balance.
Avoid leaning forward to begin the movement, which can cause you to round your spine, forcing your lower back to support most of your body weight. When rising, keep your torso upright.
Exercise: Counterbalance squat
This squat variation helps you maintain an upright torso, which takes pressure off your lower back. Hold any light weight (a dumbbell, kettlebell or even a heavy pan held vertically) with your arms outstretched at shoulder height. Slowly lower into a squat, keeping your heels in contact with the floor for the entire movement. Hold for a moment at the bottom before standing.
Advanced: Hug the weight to your chest.
Lunge
Any movement that involves placing one foot in front of the other and bending both knees uses the lunge pattern — including bending down to tie your shoe, taking the stairs and walking uphill. “Life happens in a split stance,” said Ms. Lewis.
Because of the uneven balance in this position, Ms. Lewis often sees her clients lean toward the opposite side to compensate, which can lead to knee pain. A step-up on a low platform is a gentle, beginner-friendly way to practice maintaining balance throughout the movement.
Exercise: Step-Up
Step onto a six-inch platform (or a stair) with one foot, allowing the trailing foot to hover slightly behind the lead foot. Hold that balanced position for three to five seconds before lowering slowly to the ground.
Advanced: Try a taller platform or add weight. Mr. Flores recommends holding a different amount of weight in each hand to mimic daily tasks.
Push
Pushing a door open, placing something on a shelf and rising from lying in bed all require proper horizontal and vertical push movements.
Shifting your weight toward one side of the body, using uneven force and flaring the rib cage can be signs of a muscular imbalance or poor core strength, Ms. Lewis said. In the vertical push, Ms. Lewis often sees clients arch their backs and shoot their hips forward, which can lead to low back pain.
To practice this movement, Mr. Flores recommends a modified push-up, which allows you to focus primarily on your upper body.
Exercise: Modified push-up
Begin in a kneeling position and place your hands on the floor, shoulder-width apart and under your shoulders. Keep your torso straight as you bend your elbows and lower your chest toward the floor. Push back up to the starting position.
If this position causes discomfort in your knees, you can also try a standing push-up against a wall, or place your hands on a bench.
Advanced: Once you can perform these variations without allowing your back to arch, your butt to rise or your shoulders to hunch, progress to a standard push-up.
Pull
When you lift a load of laundry out of the machine or pull open a door, you’re performing the pull pattern.
Mr. Flores said that many people pull from their arms, but when your back muscles are properly engaged, the pulling pattern becomes more efficient.
Exercise: Resistance band row
Place a light or medium resistance band under your feet. Grip the opposite ends of the band with your hands just outside your hips. Hinge at your hips and draw your elbows up and back, squeezing your shoulder blades together. Hold for a moment before slowly returning to the starting position.
Advanced: Add more tension by gripping the resistance band at a lower point, or by using a heavier band.
Rotation/Anti-rotation
Reaching for the remote, taking groceries out of the cart and even walking all require your body to use its rotation and anti-rotation patterns.
A lack of core and spinal stability can limit your range of motion, leading you to hinge your lower back instead, which can lead to pain or injury, Ms. Lewis said. She often sees this issue in golfers, in the form of “belt-line pain” on the lower back.
Tall kneeling Pallof press
Attach a light resistance band to an anchor point between waist and shoulder height (you can use the leg of a table, a bed frame or a door handle). With your body sideways to the anchor point, grip the end of the resistance band with both hands against your chest, then shuffle away from the anchor point so the band offers some resistance. Keeping your torso and lower body still, slowly press the band out in front of you until your arms are fully extended. Return slowly.
Advanced: You can do this with a cable machine at the gym and slowly add weight.
The post These 6 Exercises Are Fundamental to How You Move appeared first on New York Times.
