You bend down to tie your shoes and feel a twinge. You sit on a low couch and instinctively push off with your hands. You tell yourself it’s just stiffness, or age, or a long day… But what if it’s not? What if it’s the start of something you can still reverse if you act now?

In our day and age, full of influencers and parrots repeating the message that got the most views and engagement, it is easy to feel lost and fall into the new trends that promise “quick and easy”. The discovery of the new “whatyoucallit”, which has been a secret impossible to learn until now, if you pay 29.99. In the world of fitness, opinions come cheap. Nobody is doing their due diligence to give you an actual, verified-by-data answer to what’s the single most important movement pattern to focus on, especially as we age. Let’s be honest, most simply can’t. We can. Let’s dig in.

We are in the coaching business, and we are passionate about fitness, especially for the ageing population. When we talk about fitness, we mean your capacity to engage and perform in all life experiences across all dimensions; in other words, your ability to enjoy life on your own terms. Be independent. Fearless and limitless. We encourage everyone to be a complete athlete, building strength, capacity and functional range of motion, which covers a lot of ground. We focus on all aspects of fitness. Yet, there is one single exercise we need to focus on the most. There is a movement that, when developed properly, makes us free. Almost invincible. If we ignore it, we are doomed.

The decline in strength that comes with ageing isn't a punishment from time. It’s a side effect of how we live, or rather, how little we move. Getting weaker as we age, it’s an absolute if we remain sedentary. We get weaker, not because of age itself, but because modern life removes every reason to stay strong. We drive instead of walking. We sit for hours on end. Our homes, jobs, and even leisure time are designed around comfort and stillness. And when we do move, it's often so mild the body doesn't even register it as something worth adapting to. I am going to say it again: we get weaker as we age because of our current lifestyle and inactivity, not because we age. “We don’t stop playing when we age; we age when we stop playing”. 

Saying that strength loss has horrible outcomes is an understatement. A 45% loss of it, compared to that of a healthy twenty-year-old (not an athlete), generally marks the advent of dependency on others for normal life activities and is often accompanied by institutionalisation in care facilities. Even a 25% loss is associated with the onset of clinical frailty and physical limitations. This comes to showcase how imperative it is to work on building strength. The more we have (up to a certain point), the more we get to keep as we age, and our quality of life, resilience and independence improve exponentially.

So, what movement should we focus on the most? Our logic is this: we should work the most on the muscle group whose strengths fade fastest, leading to a more abrupt loss of overall strength. Past 30, we start to see a slow decline in strength, but we keep most of our strength in most of our muscle groups up until we are around 45. Past this point, the drop tends to be more noticeable. Yet, there is a particular muscle group that starts losing strength and capacity even before we are 30. If you’re over 45, chances are you’ve already felt it. The legs go first. Unlike your upper body, which tends to hold on to strength longer, the muscles in your lower body — quads, glutes, hamstrings — are the first to weaken and the hardest to ignore once they do.

By the time we are around 60, we have lost around 25% strength compared to that of a healthy twenty-year-old, meaning we become more fragile and experience more limitations. When we reach the 70-year-old mark, we are dependent. That might sound far off, but decline doesn’t follow a calendar. For many, it comes sooner, especially with past injuries, high body fat, or years of inactivity.

To us, it’s quite obvious why we lose leg strength so dramatically. We drive instead of walking, we sit because we have built our home, work, and recreational environments to enable it, and because when we do walk, it is such a low-effort activity, there is no stimulus to keep our youthful muscle mass. Over two-thirds of the population also do no exercise or physical activity, or do so little of it that it has no effect; even worse, people who invest a great amount of effort and time going to the gym, but skip training their legs appropriately. This means that if there is no leg work beyond casual and short-distance/duration walking at actual work and in daily life, AND there is no home-based or gym-based leg exercises done regularly, then leg muscles adapt by losing fitness. They get smaller, weaker, and less enduring. Lose that strength, and you lose freedom. And the truth is, most people are already losing it.

There’s a simple test used in clinical settings: If someone over 55 can’t sit down on the floor and stand back up without using their hands, they’re at a significantly higher risk of dying in the next five years. That may sound dramatic. But it reflects a deeper truth: Strength and mobility are predictors of how long and how well you’ll live. We’ve seen members in their early 50s struggle to get off the couch without using their hands. We’ve helped them relearn how to move, not just for workouts, but for life.

You already know what happens when we don’t train our legs, but what happens if you have knee or hip pain? You would think, as most people do, that you shouldn’t train your legs. Many people assume that hip, knee, or back pain means leg training is off the table. But the opposite is usually true. Most of the pain we see in new clients isn’t from overuse. It’s from underuse. Weak muscles mean unstable joints, poor control, and compensation patterns that lead to discomfort or worse. In fact, studies show that appropriate exercise often reduces pain more effectively than medication. What matters is how you train. With intelligent progressions, expert guidance, and movements adapted to your current ability, pain becomes manageable. Often, it becomes avoidable altogether.

So, the answer to which exercise is the most important in ageing is fairly clear, and for those who are aged and sedentary, the sooner this exercise is added to the lifestyle, the better. If strength loss starts in the legs… If our independence relies on leg function… If the ability to sit, stand, move, and balance defines how we age… Then the single most important movement to train consistently, properly, and with care is the squat.

We don’t mean the barbell squat. We mean your version of a squat. Any version of a squatting variation that you like and can do is welcome. It doesn’t matter where you start. It matters that you do. 

Why not just do leg extensions or curls instead? Those exercises have their place — especially for beginners, injury rehab, or as accessories to strengthen specific muscles. But they don’t teach your body how to work as a system.

Squatting isn’t just a “leg day” movement. It trains your hips, knees, ankles, and core to coordinate in real-world positions — the way you move in daily life. It builds strength and control that translates directly to standing, walking, lifting, climbing, and catching yourself if you trip. Machines can isolate muscles. Squats integrate movement. And that’s the key to staying capable and independent as you age.

This might seem farfetched for many, but we have seen it multiple times: people having a really hard time getting out of a chair or a sofa, or even having trouble rising from their toilets. Some of these members were younger than 55. Once more, use it or lose it. How independent would you really feel if you needed handrails whenever you needed to use the toilet? With this in mind, who would oppose including squats as one of the main exercises in your routine?

You don’t have to be “fit”. You don’t need to be pain-free or flexible or confident. You just need to start. But if you don’t start, fitness and freedom only slip further away. Let’s change the story. Let’s begin your next chapter.

At Pharos Fitness, our training approach for the ageing population is to build all-around strength, capacity, and functional range of motion. We assess your current abilities and guide you through a program that’s progressive, safe, and deeply personal.

Our goal isn’t to make you “better at the gym.” It’s to help you live fully, fearlessly, independently, and limitlessly. This is where your story starts. We’ll sit down, one-on-one, and talk about your goals, your history, and your current challenges. We’ll assess your movement, answer your questions, and lay the groundwork for a program tailored to you.

No pressure. No judgment. Just expert support and a clear way forward.