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Performing These 5 Actions May Add Years to Your Physical Age

Examination of Five Strenuous Actions Assess Physical Strength, Balance, and Command, Also Highlighting the True State of Body's Aging Process.

Five specific exercises may suggest a more youthful bodily status.
Five specific exercises may suggest a more youthful bodily status.

Performing These 5 Actions May Add Years to Your Physical Age

A new approach to fitness is gaining traction, focusing on exercises that measure and enhance functional fitness, a key aspect of maintaining a youthful body. These five exercises — Lunge with Rotation, Broad Jump, Single-Leg Romanian Deadlift, Turkish Get-Up, and Lateral Shuffle — are designed to improve power, balance, coordination, agility, core stability, and multi-plane movement capacity.

Building Power and Control

To preserve the function of fast-twitch muscles, it's essential to train both power and control. These exercises provide an excellent opportunity to do just that.

Revealing Your "True Age"

These movements serve as both development tools and tests of real-world physical function, offering a practical window into how "young" or "old" your body might be in terms of strength, mobility, and coordination.

Lunge with Rotation

This exercise develops lower body strength, balance, and rotational mobility, engaging the core and improving multi-planar control, which is critical for spinal health and efficient power transfer in everyday and athletic activities.

Broad Jump

A plyometric exercise, Broad Jump builds explosive leg power and power output in the lower body. It improves jump performance, sprint speed, and change-of-direction ability — key markers of dynamic athleticism and neuromuscular function often diminished with aging.

Single-Leg Romanian Deadlift

This exercise enhances unilateral balance, hip stability, and posterior chain strength (hamstrings, glutes), which are crucial for injury prevention, maintaining gait quality, and stable movement patterns as we age.

Turkish Get-Up

A complex, full-body movement, Turkish Get-Up improves shoulder stability, core strength, coordination, and mobility simultaneously, helping to reveal weaknesses in movement patterns and overall functional fitness that correlate with physical age.

Lateral Shuffle

This exercise trains lateral quickness, agility, and hip mobility, promoting better neuromuscular responsiveness and balance, traits that decline with age but are essential for fall prevention and general physical resilience.

Embracing the Challenge

Collectively, these exercises challenge the body’s power, balance, rotation, and agility — functional qualities that decline naturally as we age. Tracking performance and ease with these movements can indicate shifts in your physical fitness "age," revealing if your body functions like that of a younger or older individual. Improvements in these drills enhance joint stability, muscle coordination, and reactive strength, which underpin long-term health and injury prevention.

If one cannot perform all the exercises, it is not a failure but an opportunity to rebuild strength, control, and mobility with consistent practice. Mastering these exercises can help one feel and perform years younger.

Form and Tips

For Turkish Get-Up, one lies on their back, straightens their right arm holding a weight above their chest, bends their right knee, pushes through their foot, props up onto their left elbow, extends their left arm, lifts their hips off the ground, sweeps their left leg underneath into a kneeling position, presses into their front foot and stands up, and reverses each step to return to the ground before switching sides.

To perform Lateral Shuffle, one stands in an athletic stance with knees slightly bent, pushes off their right foot and shuffles to the left, keeps their chest up and feet from crossing, shuffles 20 yards to one side, stops and shuffles back, and maintains a low stance and keeps their hips level throughout the movement to pass the test.

Maintaining a Youthful Body

To maintain youth through strength, control, and power, one should add mobility work into their warm-ups and cool-downs, walk, jump, rotate, and carry weights often, focus on building single-leg strength exercises, engage in physical activity every day, even for just five minutes, and use exercise as a way to build confidence and independence through movement.

By incorporating these exercises into your fitness routine, you can work towards a body that functions like that of a younger individual, promoting long-term health, injury prevention, and a youthful outlook on life.

  1. The Lunge with Rotation exercise improves multidimensional control by developing lower body strength, balance, rotational mobility, core stability, and multi-planar movement capacity, all of which are essential for maintaining spinal health and efficient power transfer as we age.
  2. The Broad Jump builds explosive leg power and power output, critical for enhancing jump performance, sprint speed, and change-of-direction ability, which are key markers of dynamic athleticism and neuromuscular function that often diminish with aging.
  3. The Single-Leg Romanian Deadlift strengthens the posterior chain muscles (hamstrings and glutes) and improves unilateral balance and hip stability, crucial for injury prevention and maintaining gait quality, while also preserving these attributes as we age.

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