I want you to try something right now. Sit down in a chair. Now stand back up. Did your hands go to your thighs to push yourself up? Did you lean forward and rock a little to build momentum? If so, you are not alone. And you just identified exactly why this week’s Substack Live with my friend Maxime Sigouin matters so much. Maxime has been in the fitness space for over a decade. He has helped more than 1,200 people transform their bodies, written a book on fitness and body composition, and built a coaching practice specifically focused on people over 50 who are losing muscle mass and bone density. I did his program myself about two and a half years ago, and I can tell you firsthand that his approach changed how I think about movement entirely. What Maxime walked us through in this session are the five compound exercises that translate directly to the movements your body needs to perform every single day. Getting up from a chair. Picking up a box from the floor. Putting something on a high shelf. Pushing open a heavy door. These are the movements that start to fail as we lose muscle, and once they go, independence goes with them. If you watched the live session, this article will give you a written reference you can come back to whenever you need a refresher on form and cues. If you missed it, the replay is right above this post. What Makes These Five Exercises Different Most people think of exercise in gym terms. Machines with cables, mirrors on every wall, someone counting reps in your ear. But Maxime’s starting question is different. He asks what your body actually needs to do in real life, and then he builds the training around that. The five movements he demonstrated are all compound exercises, meaning they involve multiple joints working together at the same time. A push-up uses your shoulder and your elbow. A squat works your hips, your knees, and your ankles all at once. This is the opposite of an isolation exercise like a bicep curl, which only bends one joint. Why does that matter? Because nothing you do in your daily life involves one joint. When you bend down to pick up a grandchild, you are hinging at the hips, bending at the knees, bracing through your core, and gripping with your hands all at the same time. Training that way builds strength the way your body actually uses it. The One Cue That Runs Through Everything Before Maxime even picked up a weight, he spent time on the single most important technique that applies to every exercise he demonstrated. Core engagement. And he did not mean sucking in your stomach or crunching forward like you are doing a sit-up. His instructions were specific. Draw your belly button inward, then do a Kegel. That second part is the one most people skip. If you have ever had to find a bathroom urgently and had to hold it, you know the muscle contraction he is talking about. That combination of pulling in and holding creates a brace around your midsection that protects your lower back during every movement. The key, he emphasized, is that you should still be able to breathe while holding that tension. Most people hold their breath the moment they engage their core, and as Maxime put it, they start turning blue after about ten seconds. The goal is to maintain that brace while breathing normally through the movement. He also explained that if you skip this step, the tension has to go somewhere. It is either going into your core muscles at the front of your body, or it is going into your lower back. You get to choose. And for every one of these five exercises, the answer should always be your core. The Squat This is the one that matters most as you age. Your ability to get up from a chair, climb stairs, and catch your balance when you stumble all depends on leg strength. And if you fall and fracture something after 50, the recovery timeline is dramatically different than it was when you were twenty. Maxime broke the squat down into pieces. Feet about shoulder width apart, toes pointed outward at roughly fifteen degrees. That small angle helps engage your glutes and hamstrings, which are the primary muscles doing the work. As you lower, you are sending your hips backward at roughly a forty-five degree angle while pushing your knees outward. You go down to ninety degrees, then squeeze your glutes to come back up. One detail he kept coming back to is what happens with your knees. Your body will always find the path of least resistance, and for most people, that means the knees want to buckle inward as you squat. Pushing them outward throughout the entire movement is what ensures you are actually working the right muscles and not putting damaging pressure on the knee joint. For the beginner version, he grabbed a chair and placed it behind him. The goal is to lower yourself until you lightly touch the seat, then stand back up without releasing all the tension at the bottom. You are not sitting down and resting. You are tapping the chair as a depth marker and driving right back up. If even that is too challenging, stand next to your kitchen counter and hold on for support while you build the strength. The intermediate version adds dumbbells held at the shoulders. Same movement, same cues, just added resistance. And for the advanced version, Maxime demonstrated a goblet squat, holding a heavier dumbbell close to the chest. Keeping the weight tight to your body matters because the farther a weight drifts from your center of gravity, the more your lower back has to compensate. I asked him about going below ninety degrees, and his answer was practical. You can, but only if your form is flawless first. If your knees track outward properly the entire time and your heels stay flat on the ground, you can explore deeper range. But if going lower means coming up on your toes or letting your knees cave in, you are better off staying at ninety and adding more weight to increase the challenge. I also mentioned that I have used a resistance band around my knees during squats to help with that outward tracking. Maxime agreed it works but recommended using a lighter band for this purpose. If you grab a heavy band, you are adding significant difficulty to the exercise itself rather than just reinforcing the knee position. The Deadlift This is the one that saves your back. Every time you pick something up from the floor, you are performing some version of a deadlift. And this is where most people get injured, because they round their shoulders forward and let all the load transfer to their lower back. The deadlift looks similar to the squat in the lower body, but instead of pushing weight, you are pulling it. Maxime started from a standing position since most people doing this at home will use dumbbells rather than a barbell. The movement begins with a hip hinge, sending the hips backward while keeping the back straight. Once the hands reach the knees, the lower portion becomes a squat. Coming back up, you squat to clear the knees, then drive the hips forward like a hip thrust to finish standing. The critical detail here is shoulder position. Maxime demonstrated how people instinctively round their shoulders forward to try to reach lower, thinking further means better. Instead, he had us pull the shoulders back and down, locking them into the ball-and-socket joint. This limits how far down you can reach, which is actually the point. It prevents you from cheating the movement with your back and keeps the work where it belongs, in the legs and glutes. For the beginner version, you can practice the motion with no weight at all. Maxime even suggested grabbing a light box and placing it on a couch cushion to simulate picking something up from the ground, because that is what this exercise is really training you for. The intermediate and advanced versions simply increase the dumbbell weight. He also explained the Romanian deadlift, which several people asked about. The key difference is that the Romanian version is a hinge all the way through rather than switching to a squat at the bottom. You maintain a slight knee bend and hinge forward until the dumbbells pass your knees, then drive back up. This variation puts more emphasis on the hamstrings, while the standard deadlift works the glutes more because of that squatting component at the bottom. One cue he gave for both versions is to drag the weights along your legs the entire time. The moment the dumbbells drift away from your body, all that load shifts to your lower back. Keeping them in contact with your legs is what protects your spine. The Push-Up and Chest Press Maxime started this one with a question that reframed the entire exercise. When you push open a door, what angle are your arms at? Nobody pushes a door with their elbows flared straight out to the sides. You push with your arms at roughly a forty-five degree angle to your body. That is the angle your push-up should use too. He had us find our own hand position by lying on the ground and placing our hands wherever felt most natural beside our chest. Everyone has different shoulder widths and arm lengths, so there is no single correct hand placement. But that forty-five degree angle between the arm and the torso should feel familiar because it mirrors how you actually push things in real life. The progression he laid out for beginners was smart. If a regular push-up is too hard, start against a wall. Same form, same angles, just a much lighter load. When the wall gets easy, move to the kitchen counter. When that gets easy, use a chair or bench. Then move to the floor on your knees. Then a full push-up. Each step slightly increases the percentage of your bodyweight you are pressing. He recommended ten to twenty repetitions for the chest, with a good reason behind that range. Rarely in your daily life will you need to push something incredibly heavy a single time. What you need is the muscular endurance to push and lift things repeatedly throughout the day. For people with wrist
