Why your glute exercises aren't helping you
It seems everyone has a problem with their glutes right now. At least every second person that visits my clinic, tells me that another therapist has told them that their glutes are inactive/weak/not firing or insert any other glute related term that is the flavour of the month right now.
Funnily enough, 10 years ago, this isn't a thing that I heard so much. So have we all gotten weak butts all of a sudden? Heck even K-Mart now sells a set of bands to get the masses to crabwalk and clamshell their butts back to burliness.
But are all of your glute exercises and squats actually fixing the issue with your glutes?
Here I'll answer this, as well as leaving the question open, as to why are the 2 most popular glute exercises named after sealife?
Is sitting the problem....?
It could be argued that the rise in the need to fire up everyone's glutes is related to the increased time we spend sitting. As a result, it is said, our pelvis position anteriorly tilts, meaning the glutes are less likely in a position to fire.
Maybe.
But I think there is some thing important that we are missing.
And that is the feet.
If the foremost apparent complaint people present to me with is a lack of glute activity, the second would be the person who has been told that they have flat feet.
Setting up why this is the case, isn't the point here, and we could run a chicken and egg debate around the relationship between these two, but I'll invite you to look at the notion, that the answer to your glute problem is in your feet, and all of your squats, bandwalks and whatever else are in vain until you look down at your leg hands.
A foot that moves well has equal access to 2 actions we call pronation and supination. Note the word action here rather than position, it is an important distinction.
Most of you will know pronation as the movement of the arch of the foot to the ground, and if you are a runner, you might even cringe a little at the thought of this conniving knee destroyer, the evil that causes injury, and must be propped up by orthotics or other strategies before you can ever run again.
But pronation (remember, as an action not a position) is a very necessary movement, and if we don’t visit this action, our glutes tend miss out on the walk and run party, and hang around without much to do.
The key to understanding this, without too much fuss and detail, is realising that pronation is a whole body movement.
As the arch of the foot opens up (medially) as a result of the foot pronating, the sequence of events involve rotation of the Talus (think ankle if you don’t want bony names in your head), lower leg (tibia) and upper leg (upper leg). As the persons mass travels into the foot, with the knee bending, the glutes start to come on stretch (eccentrically loading if you will), and react to decelerate the movement.
Essentially the glutes are working to stop this movement progressing, and reverse the movement, ultimately resulting in a supinated foot.
While crab walks and the like are reasonable exercises to fire up the glute, if they aren’t accompanied by a strategy to ensure healthy movement of the foot, then would it not be reasonable to maintain that little change to the system will be seen?
Unless you or your client have a neural pathology driving inactivity of the glute, I encourage you to look at the foot, and see if normal pronation is present.
Start to fix this, and then you’ll create change that won’t just result in flooding my Instagrams with more and more perky butt pictures.
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