Coaches are in a sense, sculptors of the human body. We take an athlete and mold him or her to the demands of sport. Literally thousands of exercises are available to the modern athlete, but without knowing how those exercises meet the needs of competition, we can literally be spinning our wheels or holding back true progress. Athletes have limited time and energy, and cannot afford to be doing too many exercises which provide them with minimal benefit to their sport.
Enter training the glutes. The hips are the core of the body, and are a vital link in which power is generated and transferred. Strong glutes enable speed, acceleration, and a swift conversion of energy from horizontal to vertical in running jumps. Unfortunately, many standard exercises don’t provide the necessary stimulus to get an athletes “butt in gear” so to speak. The following five reasons are provided to give you insight to why you need to start getting some heavy glute specific work, aka. hip thrusts and reverse leg presses going in your athletes training.
1. Because form is dictated by function
Our technical ability in a motor skill is often determined by the location of our biggest and strongest muscle groups. When the human body is given a task, the brain knows which muscle groups can put the most power into that task, and the motor program is ran accordingly. Watch any athlete with big quads and small glutes perform a vertical jump, and you will notice a pronounced forward knee bend in the descent. This is the human body doing everything it can to ensure maximal performance by recruiting the quads as much as possible. The brain doesn’t instinctually think about “technique” when it draws muscles for a given task, it just wants to use the biggest, most powerful tools it has available.
Genetically gifted athletes will tend to put muscle in the right areas (hips/hamstrings/fast twitch areas), while their slower twitch counterparts will often be severely lacking. When is the last time you saw a 10k runner with respectively powerful glutes? It doesn’t happen often, that is for sure. Oftentimes we will expect more slow-twitch based individuals to somehow have the same fiber distributions and gain muscle quickly in the same places that a “fast twitch” athlete will. This doesn’t usually happen, as slow twitch individuals will often lack gluteal strength and make up for it in movement compensations favoring their more slow twitch, “anti-gravity” muscles. (erector spinae group and quadriceps). This will often create a negative cycle, as the hips are ignored and other muscle groups are favored, because the athlete had little hip strength to begin with.
Coaches and athletes need to take a good look at how muscle distribution affects technique. With track and field as an example, many sprint coaches will get blue in the face telling their sprinters to “get their knees up”, “keep the hips tucked under”, or sprint with more of a “pawing action”. Unfortunately for these coaches and athletes, if there is no specific strength or mobility work to back these technical cues, not much will change as far as a better time on the clock is concerned. The athlete won’t be able to sprint as fast using the new technique, even if it happens to be more biomechanically efficient.
The reason for this is that the human body will preferentially recruit the biggest and strongest muscles available to do a given task. If an athlete with huge quads and small hamstrings tries to run tall with a pawing motion, they are now placing the load of the sprint on their horribly weak posterior chain. This will result in a slower run, even after the period of re-learning has ended. If an athlete sprints with this correct form for long enough, their hamstrings will start to get bigger and their quads will start to get smaller, but this will be a long process…. and in many cases, longer than coaches have to work with a specific athlete.
Quadricep and anterior chain dominance can lead to some odd and inefficient postures in sport
The same thing goes for activity in the weight room, such as squatting. Every athlete I have coached who has weak glutes and big quads will tend to hate squatting deep, and constantly be leaning forward to their forefeet. Why is this? Is it because they don’t consider their technique enough? Not really, rather, when the weight gets heavy, the only way for them to lift it is to put the pressure on the balls of the feet, loading the quads and back, and bringing their “big muscles” into the lift.
Training glutes will help to give your body the power that it needs to back technical cues with strength. Strong glutes will help an athlete do a lot of things better, whether that be regarding sprint mechanics, being more powerful out of the bottom of a squat, or pushing hard off the back toe while throwing a right cross in a bar fight.
The bottom line: Put your strength in the muscle groups appropriate for your sport and see your technique and performance improve.
2. Traditional glute activation exercises used as part of a warmup don’t build muscle
Many athletes will perform a variety of glute activating exercises to, “wake up their glutes” and improve the quality of their hip function. For many athletes in the glute deficient population, this is certainly better than nothing. In order to improve the motor potential of any muscle group, however, a significant and overloading stimulus must be presented. In layman’s terms, doing bodyweight exercises such as glute activation circuits will only provide the most novice athlete a boost in their gluteal strength. Take a look at the builds of top athletes in regards to feats of bodyweight muscle endurance. Nobody gets big quads from doing thousands of bodyweight squats or holding a plank for long period of time, so why should we think that the glutes are any different?
Jamasen Rodriguez set the world record by “lunging” a mile in 25 minutes (wow!). Did all those lunges with bodyweight make his legs big and powerful? I don’t think so.
Hip thrusts and their variations take the standard glute warmup exercises most athletes do (hip bridge, glute march) and provide an overloading stimulus to it. We often do bodyweight squats in our warmup, and the loaded barbell version is standard issue for training athletes in the weight room. Why should working the glutes be any different? Many coaches do plenty of hip based activation work, but few consider doing that work in a progressive overloading manner. Eventually, a coach needs to be using exercises that take the standard glute activation to the next level and start cranking out heavy hip thrusts and glute bridges.
A thorough hip activation circuit is great introductory work to teach glute function but it won’t do much to maximize the power of the hips
It is important to realize that hip thrusts and glute bridges will provide a glute training stimulus that goes far above any other type of exercise, including squat variations. According to Bret Contreras’s EMG research, a standard hip thrust will provide an athlete with a mean of 119% of the maximal voluntary isometric contraction of the glutes. Compare this with 55% for deadlifts (a traditional “posterior chain” exercise), and 35.6% for a full squat (only 28.9% for a high box squat). With this knowledge in mind, squats and dead’s are great…. but they won’t get it done in the glute department like hip thrusts and glute bridges will.
Strong glutes are important for athletes of many training back-group. The hip thrust is a great tool to work that muscle group to it’s highest potential.
I am a strong believer in the general theory of training, meaning that athletes should select the biggest “bang for the buck” exercises which train important muscle groups. These exercises will not always completely replicate the sporting movement, but they will activate and build the specific musculature than more “sport specific lifts”. The general theory is all about using the weight room to build muscle and then using the field to perfect that muscle in specific movements. Athletes should use the weight room to build their glutes, and then use the track, plyo boxes, basketball court, or whatever their medium of sport is to turn on and perfect that muscle in sporting skill.
Which type of movement will build more muscle? Why should things be any different when it comes to the glutes?
Conclusion:
Training the glutes for strength and power should be a factor in the minds of athletes and coaches which is just as critical, if not more important than the role of the quads, hamstrings, or calves. Remember that the athletic body needs to be built in balance according to the demands of sport. Improved glute strength through hip thrusts and variations will provide a much better stimulus for development than traditional activation exercises. Stay tuned for the second and final part of this short series on the importance of glute specific work, which will highlight the last 3 of 5 reasons to start piling weight on those glute bridges and hip thrusts!
References:
Bret Contreras: Advanced Glute Training
Zatsiorsky, Vladimir M., and William J. Kraemer. Science and Practice of Strength Training.Champaign,IL: Human Kinetics, 2006. Print.
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