Glute Activation – Is It Really a Thing?

The Good, bad, and overly dramatic.

Learning how to grow a desired muscle group is important, but the source of your information can leave you less sure than when you started. Search long enough and you’re likely to find conflicting information – keep scrolling and somehow you’ll come to the conclusion that you’re a bad person for using exercises or strategies that have a genuine track record of improving your performance.

From exercise selection, execution, and even innovation, glute training has become an industry in itself. There’s been a massive surge in popularity, whether for stage competition or personal physique development and the subject has become quite polarizing. 

Glute activation is one such topic that as greater information emerges, practical applicability seems to get lost in the wash. Let’s take a look at glute activation from a more balanced perspective than right, wrong, or outright clickbait.

It’s Just a Warm-Up

Glute activation is a phrase that is typically used to describe a warm-up; although, it’s also often the first exposure for clever counter arguments that add nothing really of value to the conversation. 

Activation infers that a muscle group is somehow not active to begin with. By extension, phrases such as gluteal amnesia have been used in the past to explain ineffective training (and in reality, poor position) – but most of these concepts are scaled metaphors. Taken literally or not, a client is simply trying to describe what they’re feeling despite mechanistic inaccuracies.

Your glutes won’t be inactive in the literal sense, but your ability to effectively execute glute-centric exercises will be negatively influenced by poor positioning or body awareness. Glute activation drills are therefore a highly specific set of movements designed to improve proprioception or facilitate technique before heading into more effective exercises for growth. 

Glute activation or gluteal amnesia are just ways for a client to articulate how exercise feels relative to how they believe it should. If someone says their glutes are asleep – well, that’s not a characteristic of muscle at all; however, placing oneself in the lived experience of a client immediately helps that leap in logic make sense and the solutions become much more readily apparent.

Positioning

Some of the biggest faults in glute training come down to positioning. The glutes play a role in other facets of movement than hip extension, external rotation, and abduction depending on your body orientation. Poor positioning also exposes you to the potential for synergists to feel as though they’re working more than the glutes – all of which contribute to the perception of ineffectiveness. The big rocks to improving these sensations and likely stimulation is to address foot pressure, bracing technique, and intentional loading.

Foot Pressure

Foot pressure is a topic that has evolved dramatically over time. Older recommendations for many glute dominant exercises was to find yourself heel heavy and potentially even emphasizing the outside of your foot. While these focal points would initially improve the perception of glute engagement, full foot pressure is a much more effective long term technique.

Full contact with even body weight distribution across your entire foot improves stability and overall control over your positioning. Instead of essentially trying to execute an exercise while balancing on a pinpoint – flatten your foot and capture a much greater amount of surface area to perform from. 

More than that, foot pressure skewed towards the front or back of your foot will imbalance you in the direction respectively. In doing so, you’ll always be fighting to not fall over rather than ease into the range of motion that the glutes would most effectively control.

Even pressure also helps to avoid the subtle domino effect of misaligning your joints from the foot all the way through the knee, hip, and spine. A balanced approach avoids running into bone-on-bone structural restrictions for a more complete range of motion than if you emphasized the outside of your foot.

Bracing

Bracing and torso positioning more broadly also has an impact on the effectiveness of your glute training. One of the main actions of the glutes is hip extension – when they contract from origin to insertion, a huge amount of force is funneled towards moving from flexion to extension. That’s why many of the most effective exercises for the glutes involve hip extension (for example, hinge patterns). However, without a proper brace – the glutes will also have an increased contribution to pelvic stability.

Trying to produce force or accomplish distinct tasks (simultaneous hip extension and pelvic stability) reduces the efficacy of each. The best way to mitigate the amount of force your glutes need to contribute to stability is to maintain a proper abdominal brace – thereby alleviating the added pressure for your glutes to help out in that respect.

Stack your ribcage over your pelvis (breathing out a full breath cycle helps to accomplish this) and brace in this position. Your sternum (breast bone) should be positioned more or less straight up and down. When you arrange your brace this way, your glutes act more towards pure hip extension than getting pulled in too many directions at once.

Preloading Muscle

Preloading muscle is simply putting tension in a spot in advance of actually performing the exercise. Think of getting tight before you start a squat pattern – you’re trying to lock your body in a specific position so that you’re not reacting to the load once you start moving. This same concept applies to the glutes during muscle building exercises.

Contracting your glutes prior to the eccentric portion of your exercise helps to assure your movement pattern. You’re much more likely to move from the hips if you’ve already gotten them tight (whether attentional focus or something more physiological) than if you just dive bomb the exercise and hope for the best.

How Glute Activation Helps

You’ve likely been a fan of glute activation because of how it makes you feel during the rest of your workout. It isn’t that small repeated movements spike growth in themselves, but they help accomplish the major factors in improving glute-based exercise execution more broadly. 

Bands Work

The most demonized glute activation drill is likely banded monster walks or any of its iterations. Place in a cloth or rubber band around your knees and driving them out against the resistance catches more flak online than almost any other topic. Yet, countless people still indulge in this practice and see results. Why?

It’s because banded glute activation drills such as monster walks constrain you into a more ideal position to execute glute based movements with proper form. The checklist of items that help facilitate better positioning (foot pressure, bracing, and preloading the target tissue) are all accounted for.

Placing a band around your knees and wide-stride walking forward inherently encourages you into a hinge position under penalty of feeling like you’re falling over otherwise. Without a subtle hinge, you’re probably going to feel off balance. This hinge helps to bring even foot pressure and allow you an easier time accessing your hip musculature.

At the same time, a hinged position more accurately simulates a ribcage-pelvis stack and brace. It’s certainly possible to execute your monster walk with thoracic hyperextension, but by keeping your hips back and torso facing the floor even a little bit, you’ll be in a better position of bracing.

Finally, the force a band produces is inherently trying to drive your knees in (or adduct). In order to properly walk let alone drive your knees out in a lateral fashion, you’ll need to perform abduction – which is one of the movements performed by the glutes. 

While imperfect, do enough banded monster walks in this subtly hinged position that encourages better foot pressure, torso angles, and preloads the glutes – and you’ve created a targeted warm-up for the glutes.

Make It Better

Now that you know a bit more about proper positioning and execution for the glutes, double down on some key concepts to get the most out of your warm-up. Aim for a pump, be intentional with your hinge, and shoot for full(er) excursion each stride.

The Pump

The pump is when you get a surge of blood flow to a specific muscle group. This occurs often due to a buildup of metabolic stress from higher repetition and/or lower rest period exercises. The pump itself may not directly contribute to growth, but the indirect benefits are going to come from improved proprioception for your target tissue.

A huge glute pump prior to starting your main exercises of the day helps to reinforce the positioning and movement intention for the glutes by giving a literal target to shoot for. With a pump, you become more aware of the specific muscle and it helps guide your execution based upon the increased physical awareness.

Hinge

A hinged position is the throughline on most glute activation and growth exercises. Loading up the hips for your warm-up means taking the foot pressure and bracing cues, combining them into a more intentional hinge, and performing your activation drills from there. Get the absolute most out of your very short activation flow by setting up in the most specific way you can.

Full(er) Excursion

Avoid getting too choppy or short with your range of motion on your glute drills. You’ll likely get some positive reinforcement from the burn by taking shorter steps that keep you “squeezed” for longer, but in general you’ll get more out of your activation flow by aiming to take the glutes through their full range of motion. A monster walk is already a relatively small movement, avoid making it smaller than it needs to be.

Don’t Be Scared To Activate

The fitness industry has a knowledge translation problem. Glute activation is the ire of a huge proportion of fitness personalities and would-be educators primarily because of a desire to sound smarter than they are effective. Instead of demonizing an entire area of benefit, reverse engineer it to understand why it’s effective or popular.

Glute activation is one of the best examples. Are there alternatives to accomplish the same end result? Absolutely. Does this mean that every single person needs to train the same way? Absolutely not. 

Any effective warm-up should take a very small percentage of time within the grander scheme of your workout. If you prefer 5-10 minutes of activation drills, get after it. Take those positional improvements, a sick pump, and better confidence into your main work and you’ll be just fine.