Are You Training for the Gym or for Your Actual Life?

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 DifferentMost 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 EverythingBefore 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 SquatThis 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 DeadliftThis 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 PressMaxime 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 issues, he offered the floor chest press as an alternative. Lying on your back with dumbbells, you press them up until they lightly touch at the top, then lower them back down at a forty-five degree angle until they lightly touch the ground. The key word there is lightly. You never release the tension at the bottom. And Maxime had one of his memorable coaching analogies for the top of the movement. Pretend there is an orange between your chest muscles, and squeeze it hard enough to make orange juice. That squeeze at the top is what ensures the chest is actually doing the work.The mistake he sees most often, whether on push-ups or chest press, is people trying to get extra range of motion by letting their shoulders roll forward. Those extra two or three inches at the top feel like you are working harder, but all that tension is going into the front of your shoulder, into the ligaments and tendons, not into the chest muscle you are trying to strengthen. Keep the shoulders locked back and down, and accept the slightly shorter range of motion. It is doing far more for you.The Bent-Over RowThis exercise balances out all the pushing you do with the chest and shoulders. If you only train the front of your body, you end up with that rounded, hunched-forward posture that becomes harder to reverse the longer you let it develop.The starting position is a hip hinge, leaning forward past forty-five degrees with a slight bend in the knees. Your arms hang straight down in front of you with the weights. And here is where Maxime’s coaching really clicked for the audience. Your hands, he said, are just hooks. They are not doing the pulling. If he could duct-tape the dumbbells to your wrists, the exercise would feel exactly the same, because this is a back exercise, not an arm exercise.To initiate the pull, he used an image that stuck with me. Imagine there is a string attached to the back of each elbow, and someone behind you is pulling those strings. You are not muscling the weights up with your biceps. You are driving your elbows backward and squeezing your shoulder blades together.Then came the orange juice analogy again. This time the orange is between your shoulder blades. Pull those elbows back, squeeze the orange, make the juice. The squeeze at the top is where the real work happens.Where you pull the weight matters too. Pulling up toward your chest turns it into more of an upper-back exercise. Maxime recommended pulling to about belly button level, which engages the largest section of the back musculature and gives you the most benefit from a single exercise.For beginners who do not yet have the lower back strength to hold the hinged position for ten to fifteen repetitions, he suggested using a resistance band anchored to a door handle. You can perform the exact same pulling motion while standing upright, which removes the lower back demand entirely until you build up to the full bent-over version.The Shoulder PressThe final exercise covers overhead pressing, the movement you use every time you put something on a high shelf, lift a suitcase into an overhead bin, or hoist a box above your head.Maxime started with a practical observation. He has never in his life picked up a box with his arms flared straight out to the sides. Nobody has. You always hold things close, with your arms at about forty-five degrees in front of you. That is your starting position for the press.From there, you push the dumbbells upward, and as they pass the ninety-degree mark at your elbows, you begin to rotate them outward so that you finish with the weights touching directly on top of your head. Not in front of your head. Directly above it. If you dropped the weight from the top position, it should land right on your skull. A vivid cue, though he was quick to add that you should not actually test that one at home.The reason for finishing directly overhead is the same principle that runs through every exercise in this session. If the weight finishes in front of you, your lower back has to compensate for the load being away from your center of gravity. Directly overhead means the weight stacks over your spine, and your skeleton supports it rather than your back muscles straining to hold it in place.For beginners, no weights at all. Maxime shared a combination workout he calls “prison push-ups” that he has led on cruises. You do one push-up on your knees, then one shoulder press with no weight. Then two of each. Then three. All the way up to ten, and then back down to zero. By the end of that sequence, even with zero weight, people cannot lift their arms for one more press. Bodyweight alone is more than enough to get started.What Connects All FiveIf you watched Maxime work through these exercises, you probably noticed the same cues coming up over and over. Core tight on every movement. Shoulders pulled back and locked into the joint. Knees tracking outward on the lower body exercises. No overextending at the end of any range of motion. These are not five separate exercises so much as one integrated approach to keeping your body functional and protected.The other theme that ran through the session was starting where you actually are, not where you think you should be. Wall push-ups are real push-ups. Squats to a chair are real squats. Rows with cans of chickpeas are real rows. The weight and difficulty will increase as your body adapts, but the form and the cues remain exactly the same whether you are pressing five pounds or fifty.Maxime also made a point about mind-muscle connection that is worth sitting with. When you are new to an exercise, your muscles may not fire the way they are supposed to. You do a back exercise and feel it mostly in your arms. You do a chest press and feel it in your shoulders. Higher repetitions with lighter weight give your nervous system time to learn how to activate the right muscles. Once that connection is built, you can start adding load. Skipping that step is how people end up with sore joints and confused results.Where to Find More from MaximeMaxime and his wife are co-founders of their fitness company, and they are doing live workouts on Substack twice a month. He also writes several articles a week sharing the frameworks they have built from coaching more than 1,200 people over the past six years. He also writes a weekly “soul post” where he pulls life lessons from his own experience and turns them into frameworks that other people can use. You can find him at maximesigouin.substack.com.The replay of our full session is available right above this article if you want to watch the demonstrations. And if you give any of these five exercises a try, start with the beginner version. Get the form right. Build the mind-muscle connection. The weight will come later. The movement patterns are what matter most. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe