I'm suspicious of this "Glute activation" fad

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  • HealthyBodySickMind
    HealthyBodySickMind Posts: 1,207 Member
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    This is a really interesting thread, but I'm not sure I'm understanding it entirely.

    Also, this may not be exactly related, but I'd been doing the same lifting program for ~5 years, just four main lifts bench, ohp, squat, and deadlift, going to failure every session except for deloading week. While I continued to see very slow (but steady) progress on all lifts, this past January I started to add some more body building type stuff focusing on glutes (a lot of the same stuff @sardelsa mentioned above). And then suddenly my deadlift jumped by about 40lbs. x4oqzwwdjjym.png
    So while I can't definitively say it was "activating glutes" that did it, it obviously added something that I needed. Interesting that deadlifts were the only one that saw a major boost from the accessories. I wouldn't expect them to help upper body, but my failure point on squats is only moderately going up.
  • zilkah
    zilkah Posts: 207 Member
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    Activation exercises help immensely. I have a bad big toe and it somehow caused my biomechanics to shift and bear most the work for my left leg into my quad. That leg is an inch bigger around the thigh . It lead to an extremely tight left hip flexor which lead to a bad pelvic tilt. I was literally incapable of doing or feeling some stuff with the left glute until I started the activation exercises - which yes can literally be called "warming up". Once I was able to get the feel and start low , that left quad is actually going down and loads are more evenly distributed because both my glutes are "working appropriately" now .

    I wouldn't say the muscle is useless or not working , or "deactivated" necessarily, but your body adapts and finds the path of least resistance sometimes. Just like mine learned to walk wrong because I have zero flexion in one of my big toes , we can learn how to leave glutes out of most the work for maneuvers that traditionally would be predominantly glute based . Like going up the stairs. It wasn't until I started doing lots of glute activation work that they'd put a lot of effort into stairs , my quads would do it .

    I tried so hard to get my glutes to contribute to things before . I feel like a lot gets lost in translation but I definitely do think a lot of people have hindered biomechanics and are just so used to to whatever they're doing .

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