6 Exercises to Help You Move Easier

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

• Light or medium resistance band

• 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.