INTRODUCTION
Great glutes are about more than looking good in your favorite pair of jeans. Whether you want to show off a shapely rear end or persuade a saggy bottom out of hiding, training your glutes can have a significant impact on your health and overall fitness.
It seems a good majority of women out there (some men too) are in constant pursuit of growing their rear. Between the butt and the abs, there are thousands of programs designed to target these two regions of the body. However, there’s a BIG problem that nearly everyone will face or is currently facing:
Your butt isn’t responding to your faithful training and endless number of thrusts, squats, lunges, and deadlifts and you are discouraged and frustrated.
Meet Your Glutes
You were born with glutes that were made to function, whether or not they are destined for J-Lo greatness is beside the point. One of the main reasons lies in whether you are positioning yourself properly to USE the butt. The body uses muscles based on movement and posture.
A common problem I see and hear (and the inspiration for the title) is that someone’s glutes feel dead, are unresponsive to growth, and/or in pain. Simply put the glutes were never properly introduced to exercise forcing the butt to be in a chronic state of inhibition (a.k.a. Sleepy Butt Syndrome).
Typically, the quads are overdeveloped, and the hamstrings are underdeveloped which might cause you to never ‘feel’ the soreness or activation in the glutes and this is a problem. What’s even a bigger problem is that the glutes are rarely ever trained correctly.
Believe it or not, the glute muscles (3 in total) make up one of the largest muscle groups in the human body.
These powerful muscles play an important role in supporting you when you stand, walk, run and step.
The gluteus maximus (biggest and most dominant of the three) originates on the top part of the pelvic bone and the outer edge of the posterior sacrum (base of the spine), the tailbone. The large muscle belly crosses over the back part of the hip and attaches to the back part of the upper thighbone.
The muscle also connects to the iliotibial band (a large band of fascia that runs along the side of the thigh).
The gluteus medius and gluteus minimus (the smaller two), also known as the abductors, are essential to the gluteus maximus in helping your body to function properly. The gluteus medius is a thick fan shaped muscle lying over the smaller gluteus minimus and underneath the gluteus maximus. The gluteus minimus is very similar in positioning as the medius just smaller in size and the function is slightly different.
