Why Glute Development is So Important

This week has been an exciting week for me. I officially opened the doors to my privatized strength and conditioning center and have had quite a bit of buzz around the gym about memberships, personal training, and performance training alike. My first client, a high school senior who signed to play football at the local university stopped in for his assessments on Monday morning. I use things like the functional movement screen, a supine shoulder flexion test, a Thomas test, femoral rotation exams, an assessment for potential valgus collapse at the knee joint and a simple hyper mobility exam. It only took me about half way through the functional movement screen to notice a few things that were expected and a couple that surprised me a bit. Tre is one of the more explosive athletes I work with, so when I discovered he had some pretty short quadriceps and limited ankle mobility I wasn’t all that surprised. What I also found though is that, though he didn’t present with a large amount of extension even though he had some pretty significant dysfunction in his gluteal muscles. Generally when I have an athlete with tight ankles and real short quads, the glutes are “turned off” and he/she is stuck in a gross amount of anterior pelvic tilt, which in turn results in a severely extended posture. It usually looks like this: 

	Photo from: Bridgette,Ashley. 03/19/14. Corrective Exercise: Fix Your Anterior Pelvic Tilt. http://www.rippednfit.com/home/corrective-exercise-fix-your-anterior-pelvic-tilt/

When I explained to him what I thought might be going on, I mentioned something to him about hamstring pathology. He then told me that he had already experienced some “tweaks” in his hamstrings while sprinting. That inspired me to put together this blog. I’d like to talk a little bit about why it’s so important to learn how to hip hinge properly, why development of the gluteal muscles should be important part of every strength and conditioning program, and some unique ways to do just that.

1.    Weak Glutes = Overworked Hamstrings

Before Tre told me he had already experienced some mild hamstring tweaks while sprinting, this is what I was trying to explain to him. The glutes and hamstrings (are supposed to) work together to actively extend the hip in a sprint, squat, dead lift and so on and so forth. The hip extension portion of a sprint is the portion where the foot drives downward to apply force into the ground and like wise with a squat or dead lift. If the glutes aren’t firing properly the hamstrings can get stuck handling a majority of the workload. It’s a lot like that crappy job you had once upon a time with that crappy co-worker who contributed nothing to vital tasks. When you put forth all the necessary effort and your co-worker contributed nothing, who ended up burning out and dragging ass (or getting injured)? It’s important to understand that if something is weak/weakened, the source of the problem may be elsewhere.

2.    Weak Glutes = Increased Anterior Pelvic Tilt (APT) = Low Back Pain

This was the part of Tre’s assessment that surprised me. He didn’t seem to present with a large amount of APT. Had I not noticed the dysfunction during his hurdle step and rotary stability test I may have missed it entirely. The glutes are responsible for posteriorly tilting the pelvis. If they aren’t developed properly, the quadriceps dominate, and tilt the pelvis forward. This can result in the extended posture I talked about earlier. An athlete that presents in a gross amount of lumbo pelvic extension is likely going to experience a steady dose of chronic lower back pain. I think any coach who has dealt with an athlete who experiences chronic low back pain understands how much it can hinder the progress of athletic development. I personally deal with numerous athletes and clients every year that complain about chronic lower back pain and more often than not, this is the culprit. You can see how the tilting of the pelvis affects the posture of the lumbar spine here: 

Photo from: Hannon,Kyle. 10/09/12. Anterior Pelvic Tilt and Lower Back Pain.
http://truselftraining.com/2012/10/anterior-pelvic-tilt-pain/

3.    Weak Glutes = Valgus Knee Collapse = Potential Knee Pathology

The glutes, along with extending the hip and posteriorly tilting the pelvis are largely responsible for externally rotating the femur. If they are underdeveloped the femurs can become grossly internally rotated. This severe internal rotation of the hips results in what is called an increased Q-Angle and subsequently a large amount of valgus knee collapse when jumping, performing a sprint, squatting, dead lifting or in severe cases, standing. It looks like this:  

The problem with this particular postural alignment is that the knee joint generally takes the beating. If you understand where the ACL is located within the knee joint, you can imagine the amount of tension it might be under every time force is applied with the femur pulling away from the tibia so much on the lateral side. This posture is generally most common in young women. They’re generally behind the curve in strength development and their pelvic widens naturally as they mature to prepare them for childbirth. The widening of their pelvis, as you can see, doesn’t help them much with the Q angle.

Photo from: Razi,Guy. 05/03/2012. Landing Mechanics and Q Angles. Unchained Fitness.  http://www.unchainedfitness.com/blog/landing-mechanics-and-q-angles

Photo from: Dr. Eric Janssen. 02/17/14. Advanced Care for Knee and Shoulders. http://janssenorthopedics.com/blog/

4.    Weak Glutes = No Girlfriend

Guys, if you’ve got a little booty, that girl you’ve been creeping on for the last 8 weeks in the hallway is never going to notice you. Why do you think girls go to baseball games? It’s certainly not because they love the intricacies of the game or a nice long 7^th inning stretch, get real. Lucky for you, I’m going to get into a few tips now to help you develop some big healthy butt cheeks, squeeze them into your football/baseball pants, and finally get you that movie date you’ve been trying to lock down all semester.

Photo from: Owens,Terez. 06/26/2012. 

http://www.terezowens.com/woman-butt-grabs-player-after-arizona-wins-college-world-series

Glute Dysfunction vs. Glute Underdevelopment

I think there is a difference between being underdeveloped in the backside and simply just not knowing how to use it properly. I believe Tre was suffering from the latter. That might explain why I didn’t notice a ton of extension in his core positioning. So what I did for him would differ from an athlete who simply had no butt at all. Hopefully this helps explain the differences.

1. Correcting Glute Dysfunction

Because I noticed Tre’s glute dysfunction during unilateral (single leg) movements I thought it made sense to try and get him into some single leg exercises that required him to fire one glute as I removed the other from the kinetic chain. I prescribed him two exercises, one that I learned from Eric Cressey, called the supine leg whip and one that my old roommate, Scott Peters, showed me a while back that I call body weight glute bridge with march. They seemed to help Tre quite a bit already understand neuromuscularly how properly fire one glute at a time. They look like this: 

2. How I achieve glute hypertrophy.

According to Brad Schoenfield, a hypertrophy researcher, (and a dude who is considerably smarter than I am) the most important mechanisms for muscle growth are mechanical tension and metabolic stress. The third most important aspect is muscular damage. So I thought to myself, what is the best way to achieve mechanical tension and metabolic stress on the gluteal muscles? Well Bret Contreras has already proved in his Glute Lab over and over that Hip Thrusts contribute a much higher maximum voluntary contraction in the glutes than almost any other exercise. You can see here why they might do so:

And I don’t think anyone would argue that in order to stretch the glutes (and consequently achieve the muscle damage I talked about earlier) we have to achieve full range of motion hip flexion. Well hell, dropping into a deep squat seems like that would do the trick. I like to use a deep goblet squat or a rear foot elevated split squat to achieve this stimulus.

It’s because all of this information available to me (and I am so grateful of these incredible strength coaches who are humble enough to make it available) that almost everyone of my athletes has some sort of super set of these two (squat & thrust) movements in their program.

Hopefully this gave some insight as to why it’s so important to incorporate some of these outside the box methods to help our athletes experience continued health and also maximize performance. There’s a reason most professional athletes today carry a significant amount of junk in their trunk. Turns out it’s pretty damn important. Thanks for reading.

Caleb Heilman

The only think I know is I’ll never know everything – Jason Green