There has been a tremendous amount of talk about activating the glutes over the past year…and rightly so.  More and more people lack sufficient glute strength to prevent injury and have so little definition that they almost need to staple their pants to their lower backs just to get them to stay up.  Whether you’re male or female and you want to prevent injuries or just turn heads when you walk past, you need to get your glutes up to par.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that getting the glutes to fire is sometimes a little more difficult than just hammering out a couple sets of glute activation exercises. 

While fire hydrants and hip lifts will often do the trick, many still don’t experience much in the way of glute activation during these movements.  In some of these cases, the glutes simply won’t fire (you can see this if they’re not contracting) and the synergistic muscles that share the same functions will compensate.

If your standard glute activation routine isn’t working for you, there might be something else preventing your glute from firing.  Here are another couple possible scenarios:

1. Your Piriformis is too tight.

While the piriformis is most commonly known to trap the sciatic nerve (which mimics the feeling of sciatica), it can also compress the superior gluteal nerve.  When this branch is compressed it can limit the contraction of the gluteus medius and minimus and cause weakness in hip extension, lateral rotation.

In this case, you could do activation work until you’re blue in the face, but until you get that piriformis to lenghten you’re going to get nowhere.

Try this stretch and hold for 30 seconds prior to your glute activation routine.

2.  You’ve got compression at your lumbar spine.

If stretching the piriformis doesn’t improve the activation of your glute on one side try having a friend or training partner tug briefly 2-3 times on the leg on the side that won’t fire with moderate force.  This slight bit of lumbar traction often rectifies the problem.

If this works for you and your glutes start firing you’ll want to be cautious when choosing exercises that cause further compression.  Otherwise, you should be sure to continue having someone around to “stretch you out” to allow proper nerve activity to that glute.

I should note here that some people don’t believe that lumbar traction is effective.  However, I use it regularly with my clients with great success. 

Give these techniques a go and get your glutes back in gear!

About 1000 days ago world renowned strength coach Alwyn Cosgrove underwent an incredible bone marrow and stem cell transplant that saved his life!

Here is what he wrote on his blog:

“It has now been over 1000 days since my bone marrow and stem cell transplant – a procedure that saved my life.

Lift Strong is a product that I masterminded with the help of Mike Roussell, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. With the the help of some great friends in this profession we turned our little project into an 800 page manual (that we produce on CD to keep costs down). Everyone volunteered their time and their information. No one makes any money from this product – it’s all going to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

The government is currently giving billions of dollars in economic aid to banks that basically messed up – yet cancer research is funded primarily by individual donations – not government help.

When you actually stop and think how messed up it is that we have to put up a website to get public donations to help fight cancer treat while the government is bailing out financial institutions left and right it just boggles the mind. I mean, shouldn’t that be one of the first things we as a society are taking care of?

Anyway – rant over.

I’m a cancer survivor. But the fight hasn’t stopped.

All the proceeds from the sale of this product go to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

I urge you to support this cause and purchase this CD. Your purchase WILL make a difference.

You are reading this today because I am alive after facing cancer twice.

I am alive today because of advanced medical treatment.

Medical treatment discovered by research.

Research funded by money.

Money sourced from donations.

Donations from people like you.

Please help.”

www.liftstrong.com

A lot of lifters talk about the mysterious “muscle memory” that allows them to rapidly recover strength after a layoff from the gym.  However, it has been really difficult to pinpoint exactly what might account for this phenomenon.  The information below may finally shed some light on this elusive subject.

In a 1991 study by a Staron and colleagues 20 women underwent a 20 week resistance training protocol, took 2 weeks off, and then trained again for 6 more weeks.

As would be expected, there was an increase in cross-sectional area of the fibers (i.e., muscle growth) during the first 20 weeks of training.  There was also an expected fiber type shift from Type IIB to Type IIA muscle fibers.  That is, the percentage of Type IIB decreased and Type IIA increased.

At this point it isn’t necessary that you understand the exact science of fiber type changes.  All that is really important for our purposes is that you understand that there was a shift from one type to another and that this is expected with resistance training.

During the two weeks of detraining the fiber types immediately starting to shift back to their pre-training status with the percentage of Type IIB fibers going up and Type IIA fibers going down.

Here’s the interesting part:
When the women started training again after the two week layoff their fiber type shift back to where it was when they were training happened much quicker than it did when they first started training.  In essence, the body adapted more quickly when the person had previously trained which may be a plausible explanation for “muscle memory”.

Of course, there is a big theoretical assumption here.  Truthfully, it is not known whether or not a fiber type shift is responsible for strength gains in early training or not.  We do know that strength does go up during the first eight weeks of training when there is usually very little actual muscle growth to account for it. 

We also know that fiber type changes do happen during this time period and that they often coincide with strength increases.  However, there are certainly nervous system changes contributing to strength increases during those first eight weeks as well. 

So although it isn’t 100% conclusive, fiber type shifting can’t be ruled out as a possibility for at least part of strength gains associated with early training and a possible explanation for muscle memory.