Fundamental movement skills (FMS) are the basic physical actions that serve as building blocks for all more complex movement. Think running, jumping, throwing, catching, balancing. They fall into three categories, typically develop between ages 2 and 10, and form the foundation for everything from playground games to organized sports to simply moving through daily life with confidence.
The Three Categories
Fundamental movement skills are grouped into three families based on what the body is doing: locomotor skills, stability skills, and manipulative skills. Every physical activity you can think of draws on some combination of these three.
Locomotor skills move the body through space. These include walking, running, jumping, hopping, skipping, and dodging. A child chasing a friend across a field is stringing together several locomotor skills at once.
Stability skills involve controlling the body’s position, whether in motion or standing still. Landing safely after a jump, maintaining balance on an uneven surface, and rotating the trunk during a swing all fall here. Stability underpins everything else: you can’t run well or throw accurately without core control.
Manipulative skills (also called object control skills) involve sending, receiving, or redirecting an object. Throwing a ball, catching it, kicking, striking with a bat or racket, and dribbling with hands or feet are all manipulative skills. These tend to be the trickiest to master because they require timing, hand-eye or foot-eye coordination, and force control all at once.
When Children Typically Develop Them
Children begin experimenting with these skills as toddlers, but refined, mature movement patterns take years to emerge. Walking is usually the first to solidify: mastery rates reach 100% by age 7 in studies that have tracked it. Skills like running, hopping, skipping, climbing, and catching generally reach mastery levels above 90% in children aged 10 and older.
Developmental researchers have placed the window for mastering most FMS between ages 7 and 10, depending on which framework you follow. One widely cited model suggests children are developmentally capable of mastering most skills by around age 7. Australian research teams have proposed a slightly wider window, suggesting all FMS should be mastered by 9 or 10. Either way, the early elementary years are the critical period. This doesn’t mean learning stops at 10; it means the brain and body are especially primed for this kind of motor learning during that stretch.
In practice, many children don’t reach mastery on schedule, particularly for object control skills like throwing and striking. These lag behind locomotor skills in almost every study, partly because they require more practice opportunities and instruction than simply running or jumping.
Why Mastery Matters: The Proficiency Barrier
There’s a concept in motor development research called the proficiency barrier. The idea, first proposed by researcher Vern Seefeldt, is straightforward: children who don’t learn fundamental movement skills well enough will struggle to learn the more complex, sport-specific skills that come next. A child who can’t throw with a mature pattern will have a hard time learning to pitch, spike a volleyball, or throw a football spiral. The barrier isn’t just physical; it’s motivational.
Longitudinal research supports this. Children with poor FMS scores at initial testing fail to reach high levels of more advanced skill proficiency when tested again later. And the cascade continues: kids who feel clumsy or incompetent during physical activity tend to avoid it. That avoidance means fewer practice opportunities, which widens the gap further. On the flip side, improving FMS boosts a child’s perception of their own competence, which fuels motivation to keep participating, which builds more skill. It’s a feedback loop that runs in both directions.
This is one reason physical education standards in the United States, set by SHAPE America, place motor skill development as their first standard. The expectation is that children in pre-K through second grade are already practicing locomotor skills, jumping and landing, weight transfer, striking with hands and implements, and even jump rope, all in controlled, non-competitive settings designed to build the patterns before adding pressure.
Links to Fitness and Health
FMS proficiency isn’t just about sports performance. Research on Irish primary school children found a positive relationship between overall motor skill proficiency and cardiorespiratory fitness. Children who scored higher on gross motor assessments ran faster and showed better endurance. The correlation was present in both 6-year-olds and 10-year-olds, suggesting the link holds across the elementary years. Children with stronger movement skills also tend to participate in a wider range of physical activities, which naturally supports healthier weight and cardiovascular function over time.
The mechanism is partly self-selection: a child who can run, jump, and throw competently has more activity options available and enjoys them more. A child who struggles with these basics is more likely to sit out, which reduces their overall physical activity levels during the years when active habits are forming.
The Connection to Thinking Skills
One of the more surprising findings in recent research is the link between motor competence and executive function, the set of mental skills that includes working memory, impulse control, and the ability to switch between tasks. A 2024 meta-analysis pooling 37 studies found a consistent positive association between motor skills and these cognitive abilities in children and adolescents.
All three FMS categories showed the connection. General motor competence had the strongest association, but locomotor, object control, and stability skills each independently correlated with better executive function. The link appeared in cross-sectional studies (comparing kids at one point in time), longitudinal studies (following kids over time), and experimental studies (where children received motor skill training and showed cognitive improvements afterward).
In one intervention, a six-week program targeting locomotor and object control skills produced measurable improvements in composite executive function scores. In another, seven weeks of balance training improved children’s impulse control and mental flexibility. Since executive function is itself a strong predictor of academic performance, particularly in math, these findings suggest that time spent developing movement skills isn’t time taken away from learning. It may actively support it.
How Proficiency Is Measured
If you’ve heard of FMS assessments in a school or clinical setting, the most common tool is the Test of Gross Motor Development, now in its third edition (TGMD-3), developed at the University of Michigan. It’s a direct observation assessment, meaning a trained evaluator watches a child perform each skill and checks it against 3 to 5 specific criteria that reflect the most mature movement pattern. The focus is on process, not outcome. An evaluator isn’t measuring how far a child throws; they’re watching whether the child steps with the opposite foot, rotates the trunk, and follows through. This distinction matters because a child can sometimes achieve a decent result with poor mechanics, but those mechanics will limit them as tasks get harder.
For parents, the practical takeaway is simpler than any formal test. Watch whether your child can run smoothly, jump and land without stumbling, throw overhand with their whole body rather than just their arm, catch a ball without trapping it against their chest, kick through a ball rather than at it, and balance on one foot for several seconds. These observable patterns tell you a lot about where a child sits on the development continuum.
Building These Skills in Practice
FMS develop through practice, instruction, and variety. Unstructured play helps, especially for locomotor and stability skills. Running around a playground, climbing structures, and jumping off low surfaces all build movement patterns naturally. But manipulative skills, the throwing, catching, and striking family, typically need more deliberate practice and some coaching cues to develop fully.
Variety is more valuable than repetition of a single activity. A child who only plays soccer gets plenty of kicking and running practice but limited experience with throwing, catching, or striking with an implement. Exposure to multiple movement contexts during the elementary years gives children the broadest possible foundation. This is why many youth sport development organizations recommend delaying single-sport specialization until at least age 12, prioritizing multi-skill development during the years when FMS are still being refined.
The mechanical details matter even for young children. When kicking, for instance, the foot should contact directly behind the ball and move in the intended direction. Distance and power come from a longer approach (more steps before contact) and a bigger backswing of the lower leg. The trunk leans slightly back at the waist, and the follow-through goes high in the direction of the target. These aren’t corrections you need to drill relentlessly, but they’re worth gently cueing when a child is practicing, so the mature pattern takes shape before habits solidify.