Monday, March 27, 2017

Suns out, buns out! Training the glutes the right way for the right reasons.

Who wouldn't like to have a nice and round back side for the summer or for the whole year or for the rest of your life. 
The gluteus muscles includes the gluteus maximum, medius and minimus and are one of the biggest, strongest and most functional muscle in human body.  We want them big, round and hard, boys and girls, old and young. 
The gluteus muscles does hip extension, abductions and adductions  among other things and  has many function,  from moving us around all day long to aiding in posture and helps to hold the upper body straight, stabilizing the hip. It's a mover and a stabilizer at the same time. Sitting a lot on it doesn't do much good to it, it wasn't made for that, actually makes it weak and lazy. An other thing that sitting does it gives us short hip flexors and the shorter and stronger are the hip flexors the longer and weaker are the glutes. The short and tight hip flexors are pulling us forward and the weak glutes can't  counter balance in the back and hold up straight. 
So why we need to train our back side to be nice round and strong beside aesthetics's is function, our every day mobility and posture depends on it. 
Because the lot of sitting we do on a daily bases, many people can't even contract their glute muscles, not just because of weakness in the muscles but because they don't have the neural pathway to do it, in other words their brain doesn't know how to do it. If you don't use it, you loose it!! 

First thing you have to do is to learn how to do standing body weight hip extensions, abductions and adductiones, floor bridges or ball bridges. After mastering these exercises and making sure that our brain knows what to do and how to contract the glute muscles we can progress to cable hip extensions, abductions, adductiones and maybe sg leg ball hip extensions, this is more challenging but can be done. From here we can go to squats and lunges, step ups and split squats with body weight and then adding weights to it and than progressing to hip trusts with heavy weights for strength. And that is how you get the nice and round back side with a lot of function and strength-:)))

Exercise videos:

 Strengthening the glutes and stretching the hip flexor at the same time.

Swiss ball bridge or hip extension.

Standing hip extension, adduction and abduction.

Cable hip extension, abduction and adduction.

Sg leg swiss ball hip extension.