Move Like You Mean It
What functional movement actually is, why yoga is one of the best ways to build it, and three simple practices to start today
There is a moment that many of my patients describe — often with a mix of frustration and genuine surprise — when they realise their body no longer moves the way it used to.
Not after an injury, necessarily. Just gradually. Reaching up to a high shelf feels different. Getting up from the floor requires more thought than it once did. Walking up stairs, turning to reverse the car, bending down to pick something up — all of it slightly harder, slightly less fluid than it was before.
This is not simply aging. It is a loss of what we call functional movement. And the good news is that it is remarkably responsive to the right kind of attention.
What functional movement actually means
Functional movement is exactly what it sounds like: the ability to move in the ways that real life demands. Not the movements of a gym machine, which typically work one muscle group in one direction along one plane. But the multi-directional, whole-body movements that we use every single day without thinking about them until they start to feel effortful.
There are three planes of movement the body navigates constantly. The sagittal plane governs forward and backward motion, things like walking, climbing stairs, and bending to pick something up. The frontal or coronal plane governs side-to-side movement, like stepping sideways or reaching across the body. The transverse plane governs rotation, turning to look behind you, twisting to reach something beside you, the core engagement involved in almost every sport and most daily tasks.
When we move well, we are using all three planes fluidly and without compensating. When functional movement declines, we tend to favour one plane and restrict the others, creating patterns of tension, weakness, and eventually pain that ripple through the whole body.
What makes yoga, and particularly chair yoga for those who need a gentler starting point, so valuable for functional movement is that it works across all three of these planes. It does not isolate. It integrates. And it asks the body to move in ways that closely mirror the demands of real life, which is what makes the benefits transfer so directly into how you feel day to day.
What the research shows
This is not an area where the science is thin. Over the past several years a strong body of research has built behind the specific benefits of yoga for functional movement and daily physical capacity.
A 2025 case series published through Wichita State University's Department of Physical Therapy found that participants aged 77 to 92 who completed an eight-week chair yoga programme showed improvements in both balance and gait assessment scores across the board.¹ Every single participant improved. At ages when functional decline is often assumed to be inevitable.
A randomised controlled trial involving 131 community-dwelling older adults found that the chair yoga group showed significantly greater reduction in pain interference than the control group, an effect that was sustained at both one and three months after the programme ended.² Not just during the programme. After it.
A 2024 Cleveland Clinic study showed that a 24-week yoga programme was a safe and effective therapeutic option for chronic low back pain, with meaningful improvements in pain, function, and quality of life.³
And for those with chronic pain, limited mobility, or joint conditions, the research is particularly encouraging: yoga that adapts its form to meet the person, through the use of a chair, bolsters, or modified positions, does not produce lesser results. In many cases it produces better ones, because the body can actually access the movement without compensation or fear.⁴
Why yoga and not just stretching
I want to address this because it comes up often.
Stretching has its place. But yoga is not stretching in the way most people think of it. What yoga does, particularly when practised with attention to functional movement principles, is build something that stretching alone cannot: stability alongside mobility. Strength in the end range of motion. The capacity to move into a position and control it, rather than simply collapse into it.
This is the foundation of what keeps bodies functioning well into later life. Not flexibility as a passive quality, but the active, dynamic integration of strength, balance, breath, and coordination that yoga builds over time.
The breath matters too, more than it is often credited. Conscious breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, reduces cortisol, and releases the chronic holding patterns in muscles that are a primary driver of pain and restricted movement in people under sustained stress. You cannot separate the breathwork from the movement in yoga and get the same result.
The three planes of movement
Functional movement works across all three planes simultaneously — this is what makes it different from gym machines or single-movement exercises, and why yoga is so effective at restoring it.
Sagittal plane
Forward and backward movement. Walking, climbing stairs, bending to pick something up, sitting and rising.
Frontal plane
Side to side movement. Stepping sideways, reaching across the body, lateral balance and stability.
Transverse plane
Rotation. Turning to look behind you, twisting while reaching, the core engagement in almost every daily task.
What the research shows
- Adults aged 77 to 92 showed universal improvement in balance and gait after an eight-week chair yoga programme (Wichita State University, 2025)
- Chair yoga produced significantly greater reduction in pain interference than the control group, sustained at one and three months post-programme
- A 24-week yoga programme was found to be a safe and effective treatment for chronic low back pain (Cleveland Clinic, 2024)
- Adapted and chair-based yoga produces comparable or better results than standing yoga for people managing pain or limited mobility
The body responds to being moved with intention across all three planes. Yoga is one of the only movement practices that does this naturally, in every session, for every body.
01.The sagittal plane also called the lateral plane, it is a vertical plane running from front to back, dividing the body or any of its parts into right and left sides. This plane of movement can be best described as focusing on flexion, or bending of joints and limbs, as well as extension, or the straightening of a joint or limb from a bent position.
02. The coronal, or frontal, plane is a vertical plane running from side to side, it divides the body or any of its parts into anterior and posterior portions. This plane of movement is best broken down into a combination of adduction and abduction. Adduction is the movement of a body part toward the body’s midline.
So, if a person has their arms straight out at the shoulders and brings them down to their sides, it is adduction. Abduction is any motion of the limbs or other body parts that pulls away from the midline of the body. Swinging the hands from the side of the body up to the shoulder or higher, is abduction.
03. The transverse plane also known as the axial or horizontal planes, are parallel to the ground and divide the body into top and bottom parts. This plane of movement is best described as the rotation of the core and spinal column.
Three things you can start doing today
Here is where the practical work begins. These three movements and habits are accessible to almost everyone regardless of age, mobility, or current fitness level. You can do them from a chair if needed. You do not require a yoga mat, a studio, or any equipment at all.
They address the three planes of movement, the nervous system, and the body's fundamental need for active, intentional movement throughout the day.
One: The seated spinal twist
This is one of the most underrated and most immediately beneficial movements available to the human body. It works the transverse plane directly, supports spinal health, stimulates digestion, and releases the chronic tension that builds in the lower and middle back from sitting, driving, and the general compression of modern life.
How to do it: Sit upright in a firm chair with both feet flat on the floor, hip distance apart. Take a full breath in and lengthen your spine, feeling your crown lift toward the ceiling. On your exhale, slowly rotate your torso to the right, placing your left hand on your right knee and your right hand on the back of the chair or your right hip for guidance. Hold for three to five slow breaths, feeling the rotation deepen gently with each exhale. Return to centre on an inhale, and repeat on the other side.
Do this once or twice daily. It takes less than two minutes. The cumulative effect on spinal mobility, postural awareness, and lower back comfort is significant.
Two: The standing mountain pause
This is less a movement and more a habit, and it may be the most important one on this list. Most chronic tension, misalignment, and functional movement restriction begins with how we hold ourselves when we are not moving. The body learns patterns from our resting posture just as much as from our activity.
Mountain pose, or Tadasana in yoga, is simply the practice of standing with full intention. Feet hip distance apart, weight distributed evenly between both feet. Spine long. Shoulders relaxed and drawn slightly back and down. Head balanced directly over the spine rather than jutting forward. Hands soft at the sides. Breath full and easy.
How to make it a habit: set an intention to find this posture for thirty seconds every time you stand up from a seat, wait for something, or stand at the kitchen bench. You are not trying to hold a pose. You are retraining the nervous system's memory of what upright, balanced, and at ease feels like. Over days and weeks, this begins to change how you carry yourself without conscious effort.
For anyone with chronic back or neck pain, this single habit often produces noticeably positive effects within a week.
Three: The doorway hip hinge
The hip hinge is the most functional movement the lower body performs, and it is the movement most people lose first and feel the loss of most acutely. Bending to pick something up. Getting in and out of a car. Rising from a low chair. All hip hinge. All disrupted when the hamstrings shorten, the hip flexors tighten, and the lower back begins compensating for what the hips are no longer doing.
This version uses a doorframe for support, making it accessible for anyone at any strength level.
Stand facing a doorframe and hold the frame lightly with both hands at waist height. Feet hip distance apart, soft bend in the knees. Take a breath in. On your exhale, hinge forward from the hips, sending your tailbone back and up behind you, keeping your spine long and your core gently engaged. Go only as far as your back stays neutral, not rounding, not arching. You will feel a stretch through the backs of your thighs. Breathe there for two or three breaths. Inhale to return to standing, squeezing the glutes gently as you rise.
Five repetitions, once or twice a day. This movement directly restores the motor pattern that protects the lower back, strengthens the glutes and hamstrings, and rebuilds the functional hip hinge that most chronic back pain has lost.
The most important thing
The research, the movements, the planes of motion, all of it points to one underlying truth that I have watched play out in my clinic for over twenty years: the body responds to being used with intention.
It does not require intensity. It does not require youth. It does not require a gym membership or an hour a day. It requires consistent, mindful, whole-body movement that respects its three-dimensional nature and gives it the stability, mobility, and breath it was designed to work with.
Chair yoga and mat yoga, when taught and practised with functional movement as the goal, do exactly this. And the results, in pain reduction, in balance, in daily ease and independence, are not subtle. They are genuinely life-changing.
Start with the three movements above. Ten minutes a day. And see what changes.
"The body does not need intensity to change. It needs consistency, intention, and movement that respects its three-dimensional nature. Ten minutes a day of mindful, functional movement changes more than an hour of mechanical exercise done without awareness."
The Seated Spinal Twist
Transverse plane. Sit upright, breathe in to lengthen, exhale and rotate. Three to five breaths each side. Daily. Releases lower and mid-back tension, supports digestion, restores rotational mobility.
The Standing Mountain Pause
All planes. Every time you stand up from a seat, find upright posture intentionally for thirty seconds. Retrains the nervous system's memory of balanced, aligned standing without chronic effort.
The Doorway Hip Hinge
Sagittal plane. Hold a doorframe, hinge forward from the hips, spine long. Five repetitions daily. Restores the motor pattern that protects the lower back and rebuilds functional hip strength.
Ready for personalised movement and bodywork support?
Melody works with bodies of every age and every level of mobility. Book a consultation and find out what your body needs to move well again.
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Sources and Further Reading
Smith J, Buessing A, Pierce C, et al. Physical and Mental Benefits of Chair Yoga for Older Adults: A Case Series. Published November 2025. Wichita State University Department of Physical Therapy. PMC12591597. Eight-week chair yoga programme showing universal improvement in balance and gait assessment in adults aged 77 to 92.
Park J, McCaffrey R, Dunn D, et al. A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of Chair Yoga on Pain and Physical Function Among Community- Dwelling Older Adults With Lower Extremity Osteoarthritis. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 2017; 65(3): 592–597. Sustained reduction in pain interference at one and three months post programme in the chair yoga group.
Saper R, et al. Therapeutic Virtual Yoga Program for Chronic Low Back Pain. Cleveland Clinic randomised clinical trial, 140 participants, 24 weeks. Published November 2024. ScienceDaily.
Veneri D, DiVincenzo R, Lynch M, et al. A Comparison of Muscle Activation between Select Standing and Seated-Equivalent Yoga Poses among Healthy Adults. International Journal of Yoga. 2025; 18(1): 38–44. doi: 10.4103/ijoy.ijoy_132_24
You Go to the Gym Three Times a Week and Your Body Is Still Breaking Down. Here Is Why. The desk setup that is undoing everything you build in the gym and the precise changes that stop it
Marcus came to see me at 28 convinced that his hip and upper back problems were related to his training. He trained hard, he trained consistently, and he had been doing everything his gym program told him to do. What nobody had told him was that the ten hours a day he spent at his desk were systematically rebuilding the exact compensations his training was designed to address. He was lifting against a structural deficit that was being recreated daily. And until someone addressed the environment producing that deficit, the training was fighting a battle it could not win.