7 Moves That Fix Your Entire Body (GUARANTEED)

You do not lose the ability to move well just because you get older. You lose it because you stop practicing the movement patterns your body was built to perform.

Did you know that there are seven primitive movement patterns that are requirements for human function? And the catch, most of us can’t even do them as we continue to age because we stop doing the things that test them. Today, I’m going to show you seven exercises that train each one of those movement patterns that you can do in just a little bit of space on the floor that are going to keep you functioning at a high level from now until many, many, hopefully years from now. The first pattern is a basic squat pattern. And the way we’re going to train it is with something called the chimp squat.

So, you want to get into a wider than shoulder width foot placement. And all you’re going to do is basically perform a sumo squat, which we know is good for stretching out the adductors and also, of course, getting into a deep flexion at the hip. When we’re down here though, I want you to be able to shift over, hands make contact with the ground, and lean into that lead foot. Okay? You come out of it, you go back to center, and you squat back out like you’re doing the sumo squat again.

Down into the sumo, slide, and then push. Now, a lot of people talk about not wanting the shin to go past the toe or in the direction of the toe. That’s actually incorrect. Biomechanically, in order to get a deep squat, you need to have the tibia move forward. You need to be able to get that ankle into dorsif flexion because when you lose that, that’s when the real trouble starts.

So, being able to get into that lead foot is a great uh thing to work on. At the same time, you’re working on that adductor stretching. You’re getting into that deep hip flexion. And with just this one move, you want to go five to each side, five to the right, and then five to the left. Each time, trying to get deeper and deeper.

Pattern number two is the hinge. And we’re talking once again about the hips. And if there’s one that is lost more than anything else, it’s our ability to actually hinge directly from the hips. This is going to do it for you almost automatically. And it starts because you want to take a very wide stance.

What this does is it forces you when you move your hips backwards to actually create the hinge right at the hip. When we have a narrow stance and we try to lean ourself backwards, what happens is we usually just bend from the waist. [music] But when we take up a lot of that mobility from below now with the wide stance, moving the hips backwards is just going to cause that direct hinge that we’re looking for. So the activity that we’re looking to do is just to sort of sweep the floor. All right, we’re going to take our hands down, sweep along the floor if we can with our fingers.

Reach through as far as you possibly can. Come up and reach overhead. Head follows the hands. At this point, I really want to squeeze my glutes. Engage the glutes at the top.

Squeeze your hips forward to try to open this up and stretch it out. Back down. Lead with the hinge. Come down and sweep. Each time I do it and when you do it, what you want to try to focus on is maintaining as much of a little natural curvature in your spine at the bottom.

So when we get to the bottom, ideally you don’t want to be folding and allowing this to just sort of cave in. Instead, you want to be able to keep the the little arch in your back so that the hinge is actually reinforced. So every time you come down, you’ll start to feel more of that stretch in the hamstrings and adductors, allowing you to get deeper and deeper more naturally. Again, reach up to the top. Head follows the hands.

Really try to get as far back as you can and engage the glutes on each portion of the rep. How many repetitions here? 10 total. [music] Fingers touch. Come all the way at the top 10 times.

The third primitive movement we need to maintain is our ability to move on the surface, right? To walk gate. And to do this, we have to reinforce proper biomechanics where the opposite arm and leg move together. And we can do that with this exercise here called the relay. What I want you to do is just stand with your feet rather close together.

Get all of your weight on one side. In this case, for me, it’s going to be my left side. And I’m going to have my left hand up sort of near my cheek in this arm position. The other one’s going to go back behind me just a little bit. [music] In this starting position here, now what I do is I focus on the movement of the right leg.

This is going to be my forward lunging or static lunging leg. So, I’m going to drop the leg back and move the arm up. So, it looks like that, right? This arm obviously will naturally drive backwards. [music] Come back up again and come down.

Now, what you want to do to do this right is reinforce hip stability in this position and reach the arms out as far as you can to really try to challenge your core stability. So, what I do is I come back down, reach, reach, and really try to maintain a stable knee position over that toe. Right? A lot of times people will start to see this because they have weakness in their hips. You come up and you perform this one really slow.

Down. Stable. Reach. Get down into the hip as far as you can. Drive out of it.

Nice and slow. Back to the top. In position. Reach back here. Arm up here as far as you can.

Stable at the knee. Come back. Of course, you’d go the other side here. The same way. Five and five.

The idea is, can you do this slow with stability? Get deep. Maintain good biomechanics. Feel the loading of the hip. If you can do all those things, you can maintain that function well into old age.

This next movement pattern loss is actually probably responsible for more falls as we age than any other. And it’s rigidity of the torso. People lose the ability to rotate, to have the ability to twist. If you want to be able to have balance and maintain balance and function, you need to be able to twist. So the exercise we do here is one that actually will challenge that.

We call it a solar twist. The arms are going to be dissociated from the hips. We want spinal rotation as much as we can get. So, basically, we’re going to swing down, pivot off the back foot, sweep past the knee. So, I’m behind the knee here.

And I’m going to try to reach as far as I can back in this direction. Back towards the floor with my other hand. Come out of it. Arms go up. Open up as much as you can.

Twist. Rotate. Go back down again in that position. This reaches far. This reaches down for the ground.

When you do this in one move, it actually starts to feel really good. Reach as high as you can. Come back down. Up and down. Up.

Reach. Over and down. You’re just pivoting off of this back foot to put you in position. You never have to lift your feet up off the ground. You do 10 repetitions here.

Again, reinforcing, maintaining the ability to twist and rotate so that you have more three-dimensional stability and that fall wrist goes way down. We’ve hinged, we’ve squatted, we also have to lunge. So, now what we do is something called the sweeping lunge. So, what I want you to do is get down on the floor for this one. And you’re going to basically set up in this position here.

You’re on your toe. If you can get your foot flat here, that’s even better, but it requires a lot of ankle mobility. But here, I’m up on my toe. And this other leg is out [music] in front of me straight if you can for as much as you can stretch that hamstring and get some stretch in [music] there. Now my hands are in contact with the ground.

All I’m going to do is put this foot down here. Let my hand slide and let this sweep right in with me as I then slide over to that side. So now I’m stretching this hamstring out. And I have my position on this leg. Again, heels off the ground