Physical therapists often have trouble getting their patients and clients to perform all of the exercises that they prescribe. Whatever the excuse, this is a good reason to keep any exercise program as short and concise as possible. If you can keep it to less than 3-5 exercises per day, this is plenty. To keep it concise, you need to know what is important and which exercises will give you the most bang for the buck.

Also, if you’re a therapist and your home exercise programs are 20 exercises on average, then you don’t know how to efficiently prescribe exercises.

If I Had to Pick the Most Important Muscle…

I had an interesting conversation with my colleague a little while back about what we think the “most important” muscles were for specific regions, problems, or movements. This isn’t to say that other muscles are unimportant, as that would be a short-sighted and reductive philosophy to have, but as a mental exercise, we thought of specific muscles we keep revisiting as key movers or points of problems.

Them Glutes

For today’s article, I want to talk about the glutes, or the big muscles of the buttocks. If there were only one muscle of the hips or even the lower body that I was allowed to specifically address as a therapist, it would be the glutes. I consistently find that weak or underperforming glutes tend to cause a cascade of problems of the general, older, and even athletic populations alike.

At its core, the glutes do a few things: extend, externally rotate, and abduct the hip. The ability to powerfully extend your hips without compensating through the low back is a fundamental movement of the human body. It is one of the most important movements for athletes as power for most athletic movements originates from the hips. The ability to run, jump, punch, throw, deadlift, clean, and snatch all depend heavily on the strength of the hips. It is so important that renowned strength coaches and even researchers like Bret Contreras have dedicated their careers to studying the effects of glute strength.

For the rest of the population, glute strength assists with standing up from sitting, walking for prolonged periods of time, climbing stairs, lifting, bending down… there is no shortage of movements that glute weakness would affect. One need not look any further than the neurological population where a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or some palsy of the inferior gluteal nerve literally makes the glute stop firing to see the adverse effects of a glute that doesn’t work on maintaining an erect posture.

In my experience, people who have general low back pain and feelings of tightness often have poorly performing glutes and poor control of hip extension. These patients will often compensate poor hip extension with lumbar extension and have significant difficulty isolating a contraction of their glutes. Once we address those issues and perform some neuromuscular reeducation of hip extension, many of those problems go away.

A problem I often find is that untrained or novice runners will often develop low back or knee issues and often the root of the problem is some issue with the glutes. Some common compensatory patterns  include a lack of hip extension or getting the propulsive force from rotating through the lumbar spine.

People who have to perform repetitive lifting tasks at their work and end up straining their low back tend to have poor strength and control of their abs and glutes. If this is the case, once we correct those problems, even with what some people may consider “poor lifting mechanics”, these problems tend to go away once the glutes become the main movers and the abs are correctly braced.

Let’s Get Physical

Instagram and Facebook will have you believe that if you do deadlifts with water bottles and do glute kickbacks in booty shorts, you’ll be on your way to a strong and massive set of glutes. This ridiculous trend of believing that having a big butt is some credential to be a trainer or coach doesn’t help.

If we revisit the most fundamental training principles, we would realize that hypertrophy and gaining strength requires heavy progression. You need to train like you mean it. Large, compound movements that allow you to lift heavier weights will be the most effective in gaining strength and size.

But before we dive into a program for the glutes, let’s make sure we know how to properly contract them.

Find your butt

Lie on your back and bend your knees up. Lift up your hips off of the ground as in a bridge by squeezing your glutes. Most people will feel their lower back tighten up while they do this as well. If this is the case, try and relax your low back and isolate the glutes. Unless you’re loading this movement with weight, you should feel this mostly in the buttocks only.

Exercises

There are a couple ways to incorporate more glute exercises into your program. The smaller, “prehab” exercises can be done during your warm up while you can save the bigger exercises that can use more load for the assistance and accessory work.

Exercises such as squats and deadlifts will hit your glutes pretty hard, especially if you are doing a hip dominant squat. If you want to load the glutes more specifically during the squat, get a band around the knees and keep them from collapsing in.

You can follow this up with some bodybuilding accessory exercises. Just pick one or two exercises to perform during the workout.

Here’s a list of exercises that I regularly rotate through to work the hips. There are plenty of videos on youtube demonstrating the techniques for these. Look these up.

Prehab/Warm Up Exercises:

Strict Clamshells

Sidelying Leg Lift Holds

Monster Walks With Band

Squatting With Band Around Knees

Hip Series

Assistance Exercises:

Glute Bridge

Single Leg Glute Bridge

Lunge

Romanian Deadlift

Good Morning

Sled Pushes/Drags

Wrapping Up

Whenever I encounter an individual who has some problem of the low back or legs, I inevitably end up finding some sort of weakness in the glutes.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that the glutes are the only muscles we need to train. This was more of a thought exercise to emphasize its importance.

There is no such thing as a set of glutes that are “too strong”.