Getting your glutes to activate/fire is key to being able to train them effectively. Your glutes are crucial for helping prevent low back pain, core dysfunction and are necessary to balance. I’ve found that this glute activation drill can help get things working a little better.
It’s fairly common to not be able to ‘feel’ the glutes working at all. If you can’t feel them working, or can’t contract them under low loads, it will be difficult to get the most out of them under higher loads. Bret Contreras has showed the glute squeeze (#2 on the list) as a great activation exercise with supporting research. I love it. 30 seconds of this will really make a difference in your neuromuscular ability.
However, I’ve experienced that many clients have one glute that doesn’t fire/activate as well as the other side, or they have problems ‘feeling’ the glute when doing single leg/unilateral exercises like lunges, step-ups, etc. Simple solution: Single leg glute squeeze.
Key points:
- Squeeze stance leg glute as hard as possible.
- Make sure the ‘floating’ leg is out in front of you. This puts that leg in hip flexion which makes it much harder to get the glute to fire-which is what we want. We want to focus all the contraction on the stance leg.
- Frequent toe-tapping makes this exercise more of a glute exercise if you struggle with balance.
- By staying completely on one leg you will challenge your balance more. By focusing on the glutes your balance will get better. I use this often with my older clients to increase their ability to balance and wake up their glutes from hibernation.
- Work up to 1-2 sets of 30 seconds each leg!