5 Chair Exercises That Restore Grocery-Carrying Endurance Faster Than Dumbbells After 65

Grocery shopping sounds simple until you actually break down what your body is doing the entire time.

You’re reaching up to shelves, bending down toward the floor, pushing a cart, and lifting items in and out of it. When you get home, you’re carrying bags from the car into the house, sometimes up stairs, and then reaching again to stock cabinets, refrigerators, and shelves. As a CHEK III practitioner and licensed massage therapist, I work with clients over 65 who are surprised to learn that grocery shopping is one of the more physically demanding activities in their weekly routine. It’s not one movement. It’s a series of different physical challenges: bending, reaching, carrying weight for a prolonged period, stabilizing your posture while walking, and coordinating your arms, trunk, and legs the entire time.

All of these tasks fall under what exercise scientists call biomotor abilities. These are the fundamental movement capacities your nervous system and muscles use to accomplish any physical task, from sports performance to everyday errands. There’s an acronym we use to describe them: PACSFEBS. Each letter represents one of the body’s core biomotor abilities: power, agility, coordination, strength, flexibility, endurance, balance, and speed.

Every task in life uses some combination of these abilities, but grocery shopping relies much more heavily on a specific group: endurance, balance, coordination, strength, and flexibility. Those are what allow you to lift items off shelves, carry bags for several minutes, stabilize your spine while walking, and reach into the trunk of a car without irritating your back or shoulders. Power, agility, and speed are still part of human movement, but they play a much smaller role here.

So if the goal is to make grocery shopping feel easier and safer as we get older, the focus should be on improving the biomotor abilities that support stability, sustained effort, and coordinated movement under load. And when those abilities improve, it’s not just grocery shopping that gets easier. Lifting laundry baskets, carrying luggage, bringing things in from the car: all of it starts to feel smoother. Any good exercise scientist will vary your programming based on your biomotor ability needs. These five chair exercises target exactly the abilities responsible for grocery-carrying endurance, and you don’t need a single dumbbell.

Seated Standing Medicine Ball Press

 

Our first exercise in the grocery series targets endurance. We need to be able to sustain work over time, which is why we use timed sets rather than counting reps. If you don’t have a medicine ball, you can use a dumbbell, a milk jug, really anything that gives you a little bit of resistance. As you get better, we’ll increase the load. I’m using an eight-pound medicine ball here, which is light for me.

You’ll also notice that I’m rounding my back during this exercise. If we were deadlifting something heavy, yes, we’d want that nice flat spine. But we also want to create strength in the ligamentous system of the spine, which does require some flexion.

Muscles Trained: Quadriceps, glutes, shoulders, spinal erectors, core stabilizers

How to Do It:

• Sit on the chair and round your back slightly, bringing the ball to your chest.
• Stand up from the chair and press the ball overhead.
• Come back down to seated and repeat.
• Don’t try to go fast. Establish a nice, smooth rhythm at a comfortable pace.

Recommended Sets and Reps: 2 to 3 sets, 90 seconds for beginners, working your way up to 3 minutes.

Form Tip: You are intentionally rounding the back here to build strength in the ligamentous system of the spine. This is not the same cue as a heavy deadlift.

Single-Leg Deadlift With Med Ball Touch

 

This is our balance exercise. It has a built-in progression system, so beginners and advanced exercisers can both use it.

Muscles Trained: Hamstrings, glutes, core stabilizers, hip stabilizers

How to Do It:

• Beginner: Place one hand on the chair for support. Balance on your right leg. Bend your knee, hip, and torso, and touch the ball on the floor with your left hand.
• Intermediate: Let go of the chair. Come down and touch the ball the same way.
• Advanced (stage 1): Move the ball out of the way. Come down to the floor to increase range of motion.
• Advanced (stage 2): Bring the ball back in. Come down, grab the ball, lift it, and bring it back down.
• Complete all reps on one leg, then go right into the other leg.

If you don’t have a medicine ball, you can really use whatever you want. Just something that eventually, when you get to the advanced stage, provides some resistance when you lift it.6254a4d1642c605c54bf1cab17d50f1e

Recommended Sets and Reps: 2 to 3 sets of 12 to 15 reps per side.

Form Tip: Progress through the stages in order. Don’t skip to the advanced version until you can manage the previous one with control.

Coordination Body Circles

 

This exercise is for coordination, and it’s really more about developing hand coordination and proprioception (your ability to feel where the ball is without looking at it) than about loading heavy weight. Start with something light. I’m using a foam nerve ball here.

Muscles Trained: Core stabilizers, obliques, shoulders, hip stabilizers (proprioceptive focus)

How to Do It:

• Sit in the chair and pass the ball around your waist in a circle, 3 to 5 reps in one direction, then 3 to 5 reps back the other way.
• Move up to your chest/mid-back area and repeat: 3 to 5 reps per direction.
• Move up around your head, same thing: 3 to 5 reps per direction.
• Make sure you go both ways and hit all the different height positions.
• When that’s easy, do the same exercise standing.
• For even more challenge, try the single-leg version, which combines balance and coordination.

Form Tip: Don’t watch the ball with your eyes. Feel it through your hands. That’s the proprioception piece we’re training here.

Chair Hamstring Stretch

 

This one targets hamstring flexibility using the med ball to help pull you a little further into the stretch. Same thing: if you don’t have a med ball, any kind of load will work. A dumbbell, a gallon of water, whatever you have handy.

Muscles Trained: Hamstrings, spinal erectors, calves

How to Do It:

• Sit on the chair with your feet out in front and pull your ankles back (toes toward your shins).
• Start to round forward, beginning with your head and chin, then your upper, mid, and low back.
• Let the ball pull you down into the stretch. Keep those ankles pulled back the entire time.
• If your flexibility allows you to reach past your feet, go a touch wider with your feet and reach through.
• Curl your way back up, unrounding the spine from bottom to top.
• You can hold the stretch 10 to 15 seconds for a more static version, or simply repeat the rounding and unrounding as a gentle dynamic stretch with no hold.

Recommended Sets and Reps: 2 to 3 sets on a timer, 60 to 90 seconds.

Form Tip: Drop your chin first and let each section of the spine follow. The ball does the work of pulling you deeper. Don’t force the stretch with your arms.

Med Ball Pullover Press

 

This is the strength portion of our grocery shopping series. I’m using a 15-pound ball here, but start light and use what you have. We’re putting together a combination of a lap pullover and an explosive chest press. You don’t necessarily need power for grocery shopping, but there is a nice relationship between building strength and power. Because we’re looking more for the strength piece, we keep the reps low and the load heavier.

Muscles Trained: Lats, chest, triceps, shoulders, core stabilizers

How to Do It:

• Sit on the chair and reach the ball over your head. A little bend in the elbows is totally fine.
• Bring the ball back over and drop it down to your lap.
• Push it up from your chest as high as you can.
• The sequence is: over, down, up. Over, through, up. Repeat.
• Try to push the ball up as high as you can every time to develop strength and a little bit of power.

Recommended Sets and Reps: 2 to 3 sets of 5 to 8 reps. Use a heavier ball if you have one available. By your eighth rep, you should be tired and feel like you can’t do more.

Form Tip: The heavier the better on this one, as long as your form holds. If you’re breezing through 8 reps, it’s time to go up in weight.