The 5 Forgotten Movements That Keep You Young

The unusual skills nobody trains — and the ones that quietly decide how you age.

Walk into any gym and you’ll see the same three things: people lifting, people on treadmills, maybe a few stretching in a corner. All useful. All incomplete.

Because the truth is, the capacities that actually make someone old, the ability to get off the floor, to move fast, to leave the ground, to produce power on demand, aren’t the ones most people train. They’re the ones most people quietly surrender, one year at a time, until one day the body simply can’t do them anymore.

I’ve spent nearly 30 years coaching movement, and I’ll tell you what I’ve watched happen over and over: nobody decides to stop sprinting. Nobody announces they’re done getting up off the ground the hard way. It just erodes. Silently. And by the time you notice it’s gone, getting it back is a fight.

So this is the antidote. Five unusual movement areas, the ones the longevity crowd rarely mentions, that keep you powerful, playful, and hard to kill for the rest of your life.

And remember the rule that governs all of it: More is not better. Better is better. You don’t need hours of this. You need a little, done well, done often.

Let’s go.

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1. Get Off the Ground

Ground-based movement — the skill of changing levels.

Standing. Kneeling. On your back. On your stomach. On your side. And then back up to your feet again, smoothly, without a struggle, without needing a hand or a wall or a countdown.

This is the most underrated skill in all of human movement, and it’s the single best predictor of independent living I know of. There’s a reason “how easily can you get up off the floor” shows up in the aging research again and again. The floor doesn’t lie. It exposes exactly how mobile, coordinated, and strong you actually are through your hips, spine, and shoulders.

Here’s the beautiful part: you already know how to do this. You did it constantly as a kid. The goal isn’t to learn something new, it’s to refuse to lose something you were born with.

Start here: Spend five minutes a day on the floor. Get down, roll, kneel, crawl, get back up. Change positions often. Use as few contact points as you can on the way up. Make it a daily conversation with the ground, not a workout.

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2. Let It Fly

Throwing — the lowest-hanging fruit in all of power training.

If I could get every man over 40 to do one new thing, it might be this: throw something, hard, a few times a week.

Throwing is the easiest, most enjoyable on-ramp to real power development that exists. It’s fun. It puts you in a better mood. It pulls you out of the grind it out mindset and into something playful and play is exactly the state that keeps people training for decades instead of quitting in three months.

But don’t let the fun fool you into thinking it’s soft. Throwing recruits fast-twitch fibers fast. It’s upper-body dominant, sure, but done well it drives force right up from the ground through the hips and into the object. That’s a full-body power expression disguised as a good time.

Start here: A medicine ball against a wall. Slams, chest passes, rotational throws. Light, fast, explosive, intent matters more than weight. Ten to twenty crisp throws is plenty. You’re training the nervous system, not chasing fatigue.

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3. Move Fast

Sprinting and the track-and-field toolkit.

Somewhere along the way, most adults simply stopped running fast. Not because they couldn’t, because nothing ever asked them to. And speed, more than almost anything, is a use it or lose it quality.

Now I’m not putting everyone on a start line at full tilt. The goal is powerful locomotion at whatever gear you can safely access. For some people that’s true sprinting. For others it’s the drills that live underneath sprinting: skipping, march drills, mechanics work, the ABCs of moving well and moving fast.

Skipping alone is worth its weight in gold. It’s rhythmic, it’s springy, it teaches your body to absorb and return force and it keeps a gear above “shuffle” available to you. The point isn’t to be the fastest person alive. It’s to make sure fast still exists in your body at all.

Start here: Begin with skipping and march drills on a flat, forgiving surface. Build rhythm and mechanics before intensity. Only when the movement feels clean and springy do you gently open up the throttle. Quality first, always.

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4. Leave the Ground

Hopping and jumping — keeping your springs alive.

Hops. Jumps. Box jumps. Jumping onto things, off of things, across things. This is the fast-twitch preservation drill your body is begging for.

Here’s the part people don’t take seriously enough: being able to jump can literally save your life. Clearing a gap. Getting from one edge to another. Hopping over an obstacle you didn’t see coming. This isn’t gym vanity, it’s baseline functional capacity for being a capable human being in a physical world.

Jumping trains the whole spring system: the ability to store elastic energy and return it explosively. That system fades quietly with age unless you deliberately keep asking for it. So ask for it.

Start here: Begin with small, controlled hops and low box jumps and pay just as much attention to landing softly as to jumping. The landing is where the durability lives. Low volume, high quality, fully recovered between efforts. A handful of clean jumps beats a hundred sloppy ones.

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5. Switch It On

Isometrics: the daily wake-up call for your nervous system.

The quiet one. The one that doesn’t look like much but pays off every single day.

Isometrics and overcoming isometrics, pushing or pulling against an immovable resistance with real intent, are one of the most joint-friendly, low-risk ways to turn the nervous system on. No impact. No heavy eccentric loading. Just a hard, deliberate contraction that tells your body, in plain language: you’re alive, and we’re going to work today.

I love these as daily prep work. A few maximal-intent isometric holds first thing, and you’ve primed the whole system before you’ve done anything else. It’s the movement equivalent of flipping on the main breaker.

Start here: Pick two or three positions: a wall press, an isometric squat hold, a bracing pull against a fixed bar or strap. Five to ten seconds of hard, controlled intent each. A couple of rounds. That’s it. Consistency beats duration here every time.

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Putting It Together

You don’t need to do all five every day. You need to keep all five alive.

Sprinkle them in. A little floor work in the morning. Some throws on your power days. Skipping as a warm-up. A few hops when your legs feel fresh. Isometrics as your daily switch-on. None of it takes long. All of it compounds.

The people who age badly aren’t the ones who lifted too little or ran too slowly. They’re the ones who let these unusual capacities quietly slip away until one day they were gone.

Don’t be that person. Keep the floor easy. Keep the throw playful. Keep a fast gear. Keep your springs. Keep the switch on.

More is not better. Better is better.

Train the forgotten stuff. Stay young.

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If this resonated, hit reply and tell me which of the five you’ve been neglecting most — I read every response. And if you know someone over 40 who needs to hear this, forward it their way.