The Practice and Science of Glutes Training
The glutes are one of the most powerful muscle groups in our body. Their central position in our body makes them the powerhouse for stability, balance, power generation, posture alignment, aesthetics. The role of the glutes is truly a pivotal one both in everyday life and resistance training. With this article, I aim at carefully delving into everything necessary to know about the glutes when it comes to health and fitness, indirectly supporting the argument for direct glutes training. I will do so mainly drawing from the work of foremost experts who have dedicated many decades to studying the glutes, contributing to vast scientific literature development in the field. These are, mainly, dr. Bret Contreras and dr. Stuart McGill. To present a thorough representation of the glutes and glutes training, this article takes a systematic approach to the topic, starting from why talking about the glutes is relevant in the first place, continuing with the anatomy of the glutes, and further explaining the best glutes-developing movement patterns and exercises.
The benefits of training the glutes appear to be agreed upon by the vast majority of people in the health and fitness community at this point. This is possibly also due to the historical context in which we are living: one characterized by a high level of a sedentary lifestyle and widespread glute amnesia (McGill, 2009). Glute amnesia is a by-product of a widely sedentary lifestyle, which fosters the inactivity of the glutes. There are three major reasons for which glute training is relevant, no matter your end goal in life and fitness (Contreras & Cordoza, 2019). For starters, there is a health argument to be made here. Owing to the central role of the glutes in your day-to-day existence and well-being, actively working to develop powerful glutes can make a significant difference in spine stability and everyday activities performance. Secondly, by developing your glutes you can improve sports performance if you are an athlete. This is the case because of the role the glutes play in every movement pattern that occurs in both dynamic (e.g. soccer, football, rugby) and less-dynamic (e.g. weightlifting) sports. Third, there is an aesthetic and evolutionary argument in favor of well-shaped glutes. Prominent glutes are usually associated with health, fertility, strength both in males and females (Rosa, de Souza, de Lima, Rodrigues, de Aquino Lemos, & da Silva Alves, et al., 2015). As a consequence, glutes training has carryover effects in more than one area of our life, irrespective of the reason why you train them in the first place.