The glutes are one of the largest muscles in the body, and as such they have the potential to also be the most powerful. Unfortunately though, in a lot of people the opposite is true – the glutes have become dormant and inactive, and fallen far from the top when it comes to ranking as the most powerful muscle in the body.

This article will explain exactly why this unfortunate situation is becoming more common in the general population, and exactly how to activate the glutes again.

Why the Glutes Become Inhibited

Constant under-use, caused primarily by our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, is the main cause behind why our gluteal muscles can become weak and as a result, inhibited.

A weak muscle is one that does not produce much power, whereas an inhibited muscle is one that does not to activate or ‘fire’ properly.

Not having a good mind-muscle connection with your glutes is one major cause of inhibition, but inhibition also results in loss of your mental connection with your glutes. It’s a bit of a catch-22 situation and can easily become a downwards negative cycle.

We sit too much

If you work a desk job or spend most of the day sitting down, then what tends to happen is that the front hip flexor muscles become shorter and tighter, while the gluteal muscles become weaker due to spending so much time in a lengthened position.

Once the glutes become weakened, the body tends to use other stronger muscles to take over from movements that would usually use the glutes, a condition that can be known as ‘relative glute weakness‘ or just ‘weak glutes‘.

We no longer run, jump, or hunt

The activation levels of the glutes for common everyday movements such as walking, bending over, standing and sitting is surprisingly low.

Sprinters with powerful butt
Sprinting requires powerful glutes – for proof, just check out the impressive glutes on these guys. photo credit: TexasEagle via photopin cc

These muscles are more activated by explosive movements such as running, sprinting, jumping, dodging, squatting and the like. But let’s face it, how often do you do these anymore in everyday life? The sad  fact is that most of us don’t do much of these movements at all.

The consequence of not practicing these muscle movements is glute inhibition, where the body simply forgets how to activate the rarely-used muscle.

The glutes are notorious for becoming inhibited due to both increasing weakness and under-use. In this case, the phrase ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it’ certainly rings true.

Signs of Inactive or Weak Glutes

The following symptoms may be indicative of weakened or inactive gluteal muscles (but this may not always be the root cause of the issue described):

  • A flat or visually underdeveloped butt
  • Excessive forward tilt of the pelvis (anterior tilt), resulting in a standing posture with your butt sticking out
  • Excessive backwards tilt of the pelvis (posterior tilt), resulting in a standing posture with your tailbone tucked underneath
  • Lower back pain, hip pain
  • Pain in joints when performing some movements involving the lower body, due to incorrect load bearing as the glutes no longer work to support the movement

How To Activate the Glutes and Wake Up Forgotten Muscles

Reminding the body how to activate the glutes can take work. The basic process requires you to re-establish and strengthen neural signalling pathways that will correctly route the signals from your brain to the target muscle, and cause it to activate or ‘fire’ as it is supposed to.

There are no short-cuts here. What it basically boils down to is consistent practice and quality repetition.

Pay particular attention to correct form and really activating the correct muscles during these exercises. The biggest mistake you can make is to progress too quickly, because of the way the nervous system works to propagate signals to your muscles.

Take Steps Forward, Not Back – Strengthen the Right Pathways

Every time your body sends signals through your nervous system, those neural pathways are strengthened, and the same signal is sent through faster next time. This is why practicing a particular movement, or learning a new skill, becomes easier with practice – every time you repeat the same thing, you are strengthening the neural pathway which makes it easier to do again the next time.

This means that in the following exercises you must perform quality repetitions over quantity. This can and will take a surprising amount of concentration – but take the time to set up and focus your mind before each repetition. It is possible to make backwards progress by practicing the wrong way.

Every time you complete one repetition of the exercise correctly, activating the glute in it way it is supposed to be used, that is a step forward.

Every time you complete a repetition of the exercise where you don’t activate the glute correctly, use poor form, or allow other muscles to take over, that is a step backwards.

Make sure that you are constantly taking steps forward, not backwards. Take your time to concentrate and perform each repetition correctly. Practicing the incorrect motions only serves to ingrain these patterns and compound any problems associated with relative glute weakness or inhibition issues.

Stage 1 Glute Activation: Visualization and Palpation

Palpation just means using your fingers to feel the area for a muscular contraction. You’ll use this tool to get to know your butt (nothing suss!) in this stage and see what level of control you have over your butt muscles.

In the first stage of reactivating your glutes, you’ll be focusing on trying to feel the glute muscles working and actually getting them to fire correctly. This is also known as your mind-muscle connection – we’re going to strengthen it in this stage.

First of all, you need to familiarize yourself with the actual muscles of the butt. Don’t skip this step, as learning about your anatomy will help you to visualize the muscles in your body working as well.

Your butt is primarily made up of three different muscles, named and pictured below:

    • Gluteus Maximus
    • Gluteus Medius
    • Gluteus Minimus
Gluteal muscles anatomy
Gluteus Maximus (Yellow), Gluteus Medius (Blue) and Gluteus Minimus (Red) are the main muscles that contribute to the shape of the buttocks. image credit: CFCF via Wikimedia Commons cc

From a standing position, place fingers on each side of your butt cheeks and attempt to contract the glutes by imaging squeezing your butt cheeks together (this may sound funny but picture a pencil slotted between your butt cheeks and then clenching them closed as hard as possible to hold that pencil in place!).

If you do already have some glute control you should be able to feel the muscle moving beneath your fingers.  You can also do this exercise lying down, but you should be able to see or feel the butt muscles moving as you contract, as you can see in this video:

If you can’t feel any muscles working or have difficulty clenching your butt cheeks together, don’t feel bad. This is extremely common and it means that your glutes are quite inactive, or you haven’t built up the proper mind-muscle connection in order to be able to voluntarily contract those muscles.

If you have difficulty with the above, then try performing the exercise lying down on your side or even seated. Another key is to visualize the muscle moving as you perform the contraction, even if you can’t feel any movement with your fingers. Studies have shown that visualization of the muscle moving can increase muscle activation.

Once you get more practiced with this exercise, try to increase your level of control to be able to activate one side of your glutes at a time.

Stage 2 Glute Activation: Isolation Exercises

How did you go in Stage 1? Were you able to contract your butt muscles and feel them contracting?

If so, that’s excellent. You will need to try and refine your level of control so that you can just activate the glute muscles voluntarily while keeping any surrounding muscles (for example the muscles of your legs – the quadriceps and hamstrings) relaxed.

If you weren’t able to get a contraction in Stage 1, don’t feel bad. This is actually really common for most people starting out. In this Stage 2 exercise, you’ll be learning an isolation exercise that should help you to get some control over your butt muscles.

Isolation Exercise 1: Pelvic Tilt/Glute Squeeze

The first exercise we’ll try is a pelvic tilt or glute squeeze. These can be done standing, with your hands over your butt to help detect any contraction. This kind of feedback from feeling the muscles working is excellent at helping build up your voluntary control over the glute contractions.

Here’s what a glute squeeze looks like – you will need to tilt your pelvis forward and under. To do this motion, you’ll basically be forced into using your glutes. Another cue that can help with getting the glutes to fire when you do this exercise is to imaging screwing your heels down into the floor in an inward and forward fashion (though don’t actually move your feet). This can help the glutes to fire also.

Once you have mastered the basic movement, you can get a bit more intense with the motion. Try doing the glute squeezes both fast and slow, to see if you can get and ‘burn out’ in the glute muscles (in which case you know they’ve been working!).

Be sure to keep any other muscles relaxed as much as possible. You really just want to activate only the glutes and minimize any other muscles from taking over, so if you notice you are tensing up your quads or abdominals when you perform this exercise, then slow down and try to isolate just the butt starting with a weaker contraction to begin with.

You can repeat this exercise palpating (feeling with your hands) around the different areas of your butt, and experimenting to see which areas move as you focus on creating a movement in the muscles. Try feeling for the upper glutes, the side of the butt and the lower portion of the butt.

 

Isolation Exercise 2: Prone Leg Lifts

The second isolation exercise is a simple leg lift, that is great for activating the glutes as it’s difficult to achieve the motion shown without using your butt muscles (that’s good news for those of us who might have inactive or lazy glutes!).

Try out the below to see if you can feel this exercise in your glutes at all:

 

Stage 3 Glute Activation: Compound Exercises

Once you have been able to ‘feel’ your glute muscles working (hopefully the isolation exercises in Stage 2 would have sorted you out!), then you’re able to move on to compound exercises.

The downside to doing compound exercises before you have established the correct mind-muscle connection with your glutes is that it’s easy for other muscle groups to take over in compound exercises. When this happens, your glutes don’t end up doing much work at all, and what was supposed to be a ‘great butt exercise’ can turn out to just work some other muscle group like your legs or back instead.

I would suggest starting with the following ‘compound’ movement for glutes: the glute bridge.  This exercise is largely one that does isolate the glutes – but only if you have a good mind-muscle connection. Doing glute bridges does also recruit the lower back and hamstring muscles, so it takes some extra focus and attention to really try and mentally engage the glutes while you are doing this exercise.

Even if you don’t have a great mind-muscle connection yet and struggle to feel glute bridges in your glutes, you can still do drills with this exercise to improve your glute activation.

I promise you though, that once you ‘get it’, you will be able to feel and engage your glutes to work in many different types of exercises, be it squats, lunges, deadlifts, or even everyday tasks like walking and sitting.

The video below shows how to do the glute bridge for glute activation, or check out our in-depth guide on using glute bridges to master glute activation here.

 

Summary

Well done! If you’ve read (and presumably actioned!) this far, you’re well on your way to reactivating those lazy glute muscles.  As we covered in this article, it’s very common for the glute muscles to become inactive in most people due to our sedentary lifestyle. Even for those people who are quite active, it can still be common to not have activation of the butt muscles, simply because you may have never learnt how to do this naturally, and other muscle groups can often easily take over.

The remedy to this is to take baby steps to re-train your glute muscles and re-establish your mind-muscle connection with those buns! It can seem very painstaking at first and even as though nothing you are doing is making any difference, but the key is perseverance and visualizing the muscle contracting as you attempt to do the isolation exercises shown.

With time and practice, you will definitely get it, and your butt will thank you for it!

 

Have you struggled with inactive glutes and did you find a way to reactivate them? Let me know your story in the comments below, I’d love to hear others’ experiences!

How To Activate The Glutes Effectively: Unlock Your Most Powerful Muscle
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2 thoughts on “How To Activate The Glutes Effectively: Unlock Your Most Powerful Muscle

  • July 12, 2016 at 2:46 pm
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    will like to try these exercises

    Reply
    • July 16, 2016 at 2:43 pm
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      Hi Gailene, thanks for stopping by! We have a great list of butt exercises over at this page, if you want to give some a go!

      Reply

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