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...

Upper body rotation is obviously important in sports such as baseball, discus etc. While it’s importance in sports such as running are less obvious, all of these sports suffer from the inability to find equal rotation in both sides.

Understanding rotation during running is best understood through realising the way joints rotate when we walk. 

When we walk, the process of walking sees joints opening and closing in the feet, which (should) see the lower leg also rotating internally and externally. Following this up sees the upper leg doing similar movements a little faster, and the hip then moves in various planes as the leg moves back and forth.

As the joints through the body move, they pull on the muscles to load them like an elastic band, then pulling them back towards neutral, and to rotate in the opposite direction.

The main problems I see with runners being able to do this normal process is:

• Rotating more on one side than the other
• Lack of rotation in one...

To your seasoned runner, the word pronation comes with all the connotations of a 4-eyed young overpaid Englishman, waving a crooked wand around and casting the spell of running doom on you, as you are destined to years of running injuries and poor technique.

Unless, of course, you fork out a few hard earned dollars for the latest and greatest shoes, designed to rid you of your over-pronation curse....

Let me kick off with something that might get your shoelaces in a knot.

There is no such thing as over pronation.

In fact, I don’t even like to use the term pronation at all, when describing a foot.

Because pronation is an ACTION.

It is the beautiful cosmic synchronicity of 33 joints and 28ish bones opening and closing, as muscles load and preload, to frame the amazing sequence of events that we call walking, or in this case, running. But as should rightfully crawl before you run, in this case we might look at how you walk before you run.

What is pronation?

If we can...

Pain in the butt..piriformis syndrome myths, hamstring confusion and other reasons that might not be why you think you are in pain

It isn’t until you’ve succumbed to a deep horrible pain in the butt, that you come to realise why the phrase, “pain in the butt,” exists. At times it can be debilitating for some, with painkillers having no real impact, yet daily stresses and difficulties, can increase the pain to the point of not being able to interact with anyone, without filling your yearly swear jar quota in a day.

Runners in particular tend to jump to 2 conclusions for a pain in the butt. Hamstring tendinopathy and piriformis syndrome lead the charge here, and very often, Dr. Google, and poorly armed therapists, commonly misdiagnose these, and even worse, offer up treatments that never really see the patient set free from the patient status.

Here we look at some common reasons for butt pain and a few ideas as to what needs to happen to get past it.

...

Could the way you walk be wrecking your squat?

The headline here could have the word “squat” replaced by nearly anything, but here we’ll look at how one particular phase of your walking cycle, may be destroying your ability to perform a decent squat.

Squat Depth

During the squat, our ability to descend to depth is limited somewhat through the length of the adductors. Often times doing some work through releasing the adductors, and following up with some squat patterning work can help to see the athlete get even deeper in the squat.

But what happens when one side is shorter than the other?

Hip rotation in the squat exercise

A huge number of athletes I see suffer from some rotation in their squat, and a good number of you reading this will as well. Sometimes this will manifest as a very obvious rotation through the hips (where one hip moves backwards during the squat), other times it will result in a weight shift to one side, or any other array of...

Can Ankle Sprains Cause Shoulder Pain?

The body only heals for efficiency, not perfection (Gary Ward).

Ever had an ankle sprain? Even a little one? This could be the reason for your wrecked shoulder (or back, or knee or the other bits that continue to cause pain).

In 2016, the foot and ankle association released content encouraging medical professionals to take an ankle sprain, any ankle sprain. As part of a significant medical history, also publishing an interesting paper looking at the long term effects a of quality of life on ankle sprains (read it here if you like academic vibes).

Let's not limit this sentiment of long term problems to only ankle sprains. The info here is in this little post is relevant for any injury, but for a sec, let's think about what happened when you sprained your ankle (or did the thing that you did that hurt, if you are one of very few people to have never sustained a sprain).

Following the sprain, you surely had concerns about placing your full body...