Strengthen your Glutes
Many people come to the gym wanting to build a better butt! And yes, training the glute muscles builds a round and defined shape and helps you feel more confident in yourself, and they are also very functional muscles. Having strong glutes helps with stability posture and reducing lower back pain and they are also heavily involved in power in lower body movements such as squats, deadlifts, lunges and sprinting.
So often people get into the gym and straight away doing squats, lunges and deadlifts, wanting to build their glutes. And this is fantastic as these exercises do use the glutes BUT there is often a problem. If you haven’t done any exercises to really activate the glutes, they are often not fully active and can be on the weaker side if you haven’t used them. Particularly if you tend to sit a lot at your office job. And this often ends up with the quads and hamstrings taking over.
Today I want to give you a broader understanding of the glutes and to wake them up so that you can actually use them!
Firstly, what are the glutes? They are one group of muscles that move your hip. You have 3 glute muscles - Glute maximus, which is the big bulk of your glutes, and then glute medius and minimus, which are smaller and on the side of your glutes). The glutes work in primarily 4 ways - hip extension (opening or lengthening the front of the hip), hip abduction (taking the leg away from the midline of the body), hip internal and external rotation (rotating the femur bone away from and towards the midline of the body). Today I will give you 4 exercises that you can do to train your glutes through all their movements!
Hip extension - The go to exercise is the hip thrust, this is because the hip thrust is under the most load when in hip extension, it is great for strengthening the glutes in hip extension. This is great to counteract the tension that can come in your hips and low back from being in a flexed position for most of your day. Also becoming stronger in hip extension applies across to the activation of your glutes in squats and deadlifts - although they are not maximally loaded in hip extension, using the glutes to come through into hip extension is very important
Hip abduction - Take away from the midline of the body. A great exercise is the simple side step, this means taking the leg away from the body. The glute medius muscles are very important for stability of the hip. It is easy to collapse through the hip which can cause hip and low back pain, plus it is very unstable. Simple side walks strengthen the glute medius muscles so that they fire correctly.
Hip External rotation - band external rotations. Exernal rotation is important because a common fault in many movements is a collapsing at the knee, or knee valgus. Also similar to what I said about hip abduction, the glute fibres responsible for external rotation can help with hip stability, and not collapsing inwards. This is a common cause of knee pain. Having good external rotation also helps with your power in squats and deadlifts as well as you can get a good about of “torque” which is the torsion force needed for power.
Hip internal rotations - reverse clams. Although seemingly counterproductive to the external rotation, it is important to train the opposite. Otherwise you will have weakness in this plane and the body will be unstable. Having good hip internal rotation also reduces the chance of injury and helps with the awareness of the centre of your hip bone in the hip joint.
The glutes are used in many exercises, but doing these 4 will help you develop them enough to be strong and stable for reduced pain, improved power in your compound movements and a good butt!