A motor skill is a function that involves specific movements of the body's muscles to perform a certain task. These tasks could include walking, running, or riding a bike. In order to perform this skill, the body's nervous system, muscles, and brain have to all work together. The goal of motor skill is to optimize the ability to perform the skill at the rate of success, precision, and to reduce the energy consumption required for performance. Performance is an act of executing a motor skill or task. Continuous practice of a specific motor skill will result in a greatly improved performance, which leads to motor learning. Motor learning is a relatively permanent change in the ability to perform a skill as a result of continuous practice or experience.

A fundamental movement skill is a developed ability to move the body in coordinated ways to achieve consistent performance at demanding physical tasks, such as found in sports, combat or personal locomotion, especially those unique to humans, such as ice skating, skateboarding, kayaking, or horseback riding. Movement skills generally emphasize stability, balance, and a coordinated muscular progression from prime movers (legs, hips, lower back) to secondary movers (shoulders, elbow, wrist) when conducting explosive movements, such as throwing a baseball. In most physical training, development of core musculature is a central focus. In the athletic context, fundamental movement skills draw upon human physiology and sport psychology.

Motor skills are movements and actions of the muscles. There are two major groups of motor skills:

Both gross and fine motor skills can become weakened or damaged. Some reasons for these impairments could be caused by an injury, illness, stroke, congenital deformities (an abnormal change in the size or shape of a body part at birth), cerebral palsy, and developmental disabilities. Problems with the brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, muscles, or joints can also have an effect on these motor skills, and decrease control over them.

Motor skills develop in different parts of a body along three principles:

In children, a critical period for the development of motor skills is preschool years (ages 3–5), as fundamental neuroanatomic structure shows significant development, elaboration, and myelination over the course of this period. Many factors contribute to the rate that children develop their motor skills. Unless afflicted with a severe disability, children are expected to develop a wide range of basic movement abilities and motor skills around a certain age. Motor development progresses in seven stages throughout an individual's life: reflexive, rudimentary, fundamental, sports skill, growth and refinement, peak performance, and regression. Development is age-related but is not age dependent. In regard to age, it is seen that typical developments are expected to attain gross motor skills used for postural control and vertical mobility by 5 years of age.

There are six aspects of development:

In the childhood stages of development, gender differences can greatly influence motor skills. In the article "An Investigation of Age and Gender Differences in Preschool Children's Specific Motor Skills", girls scored significantly higher than boys on visual motor and graphomotor tasks. The results from this study suggest that girls attain manual dexterity earlier than boys. Variability of results in the tests can be attributed towards the multiplicity of different assessment tools used. Furthermore, gender differences in motor skills are seen to be affected by environmental factors. In essence, "parents and teachers often encourage girls to engage in [quiet] activities requiring fine motor skills, while they promote boys' participation in dynamic movement actions". In the journal article "Gender Differences in Motor Skill Proficiency From Childhood to Adolescence" by Lisa Barrett, the evidence for gender-based motor skills is apparent. In general, boys are more skillful in object control and object manipulation skills. These tasks include throwing, kicking, and catching skills. These skills were tested and concluded that boys perform better with these tasks. There was no evidence for the difference in locomotor skill between the genders, but both are improved in the intervention of physical activity. Overall, the predominance of development was on balance skills (gross motor) in boys and manual skills (fine motor) in girls.