The Five Pillars of Physical Fitness
Movement is essential for maintaining health and is the foundation of lasting resilience. A well-designed movement program addresses five essential pillars: Flexibility, Strength, Mobility, Balance, and Endurance.
Flexibility improves and maintains the full range of motion of your joints, allowing them to move freely without restrictions.
Strength provides the force to move and stabilize your body through daily activities and physical challenges.
Mobility combines flexibility and strength, allowing you to actively control movement through the full range of motion with power and precision—this is what you actually use in real life. Poor mobility can lead to compensation patterns, where the body "cheats" by using other joints or muscles to compensate for restrictions. Over time, these compensations lead to pain, injury, or joint degradation.
Balance is the ability to maintain control of your body's position, whether stationary or in motion. It integrates input from the eyes, inner ear, and proprioceptive sensors to maintain stability during everyday activities—walking, climbing stairs, reaching for objects, changing direction, and recovering from stumbles.
Endurance ensures you can sustain high-quality movement over time without fatigue compromising your form or creating compensatory movement patterns.
These pillars are helpful for understanding the importance of the individual components, but real fitness is how they work together. When integrated, they create resilient, capable bodies that allow us to participate in activities we enjoy and preserve independence as we age. The goal isn't perfection in any single pillar, but instead building sufficient capacity in each to support the movements that matter to our quality of life now and for decades to come.
As a beginning measure of fitness, regardless of age, here are movements we ALL need to be able to do (ok, you might get a pass on some of them if you are over 75):
- Touching your toes
- Squatting
- Standing on one leg
- Skipping
- Sitting on the ground
- Getting up from the floor without using your hands