Men’s Health/Eric Rosati
If you spend all day sitting, your butt is in danger.
There’s more at risk than just one of your cheeks going numb and falling asleep—if you’re not active, you might also wind up with dead butt syndrome. The technical term for the condition, gluteal amnesia, is a little less alarming, but the prognosis remains the same: When your gluteus medius isn’t engaged and worked regularly, it stops “firing”, and can’t properly initiate contraction.
There is a solution to the problem, thankfully. Get your butt in gear and engage those glutes. You can jump straight into glute-intensive exercises like Bulgarian split squats and hip thrusts—but you’d be even better served if you preface those moves with a few activation drills.
Trainer Charlee Atkins, C.S.C.S. understands how important it is to get the glutes firing, especially after having spent the bulk of her fitness career with her butt planted on a bike seat as a spin class instructor. Now, she’s sharing the drills she uses to activate the body’s biggest muscle before she trains her lower body.
Before sharing the workout, Atkins poses a question. “Would you place these at the beginning or the end of your workout?” The answer, she continues, is that there is no one size fits all conclusion.
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“Well, the good news is, you can do them either, and it will solely depend on what your training goals are. I, however, typically place them at the beginning of my workouts as glute activation drills.”
To take on a few of these moves, you’ll need an exercise band. Check out this option from WODFitters if you need one to try the series out at home.
Perform each drill for 30 to 60 seconds on each side
You can pick out two or three of the exercises to do before your lower body workout to get your glutes firing, run through the whole series as a circuit to give your butt some love as a quick standalone routine, or finish off a leg day with any of the moves as a standalone drill.
Want to learn more moves from Atkins? Check out our series full of her workout tips, Try Her Move. You can also take on her new 30 day challenge in our streaming All Out Studio app.
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