The Glutes – Why Do You Need Strong Glutes?
The glutes are a group of muscles more commonly known as the buttocks. They are the muscles responsible for your hip extension, internal rotation, and abduction. Not only are they responsible for you looking good and attractive, they are also important for your overall health and fitness.
The glutes are important in to ensure your pelvis are aligned when standing on one leg, to propel you while running, and support your lower back. Your glutes also support your back and knees during running and lifting motions to prevent injuries. Having strong buttock muscles is crucial in having stable posture in many lower limb exercises, running or even just walking.
Why have strong glutes?
Prevent back pain
Your glutes is responsible for hip extension. That is straightening your hip. When your feet are planted, it helps to extend your trunk off the ground. If you do exercises like the deadlift, this is the movement that I am referring to. In other words, when the feet are planted on the ground, the glutes are assisting in your pelvic and trunk movement as well. When your glutes are strong, you have a stable pelvis and better support for your lower back, so any load can be more evenly distributed through the lower back and lower extremities. A sign of weak glutes is rounding of the back during a deadlift.
Prevent knee pain
Another way your gluteal muscles is great is it helps with your pelvic stability. This is important because any instability at the ankle, knee, or hip can cause stretch to the other joints in the lower limb. Therefore, an imbalance at the hip causes excess stress at the knee and ankle. Pelvic instability also causes your thigh bone to rotate inwards which is one of the main reasons for anterior knee pain/ runner’s knee. This is actually one of the most common cause of knee pain for many individuals with knee pain.
Improve performance
Strong gluteal muscles are also able to give you the explosive power needed to propel you forward in running or jumping. It is therefore obvious that it is needed in many aspects of athletic performance such as speed, acceleration, and agility. Strengthen your gluteal muscles and you may find you can lift more, run faster, jump higher, or even just move in a more efficient way than most of your competitors.
We hope that you understand the importance of the Glutes, not just as a means to looking good, but as something that benefits your health and fitness. The question is how do you know if you have pelvic instability or weak gluteal muscles? Below is a quick video to test for this. If you have any questions about this feel free to contact us. Also, check out our instagram channel for more useful videos and tips for your health.