We've been warned repeatedly that sitting is the new smoking, but spending all that time on your butt is putting your glutes to sleep. You can call it sleeping butt syndrome, hibernating hiney, or dead butt disorder, but no matter how you refer to it, you need to wake your ass up. Literally. Inactive and underperforming glutes can lead to debilitating knee, hip, and lower back pain. Plus, if you're looking for booty gains, a butt that is not working cannot grow.
This workout will resuscitate your sleeping booty. Once you fire up your glutes, you can start working on your booty gains for a full, lovely, and strong backside.
Tight hip flexors, the muscle group on the front of the hips that works in opposition to your glutes, can interfere with your butt muscles engaging. The hip flexors, part of your quad and psoas, are shortened by sitting for long periods of time as well as sleeping in the fetal position. You have to lengthen and loosen your hips before even attempting to fire up your booty. Here's how to do just that.
Roll Out Your Quads
Grab a foam roller — most gyms have them — and roll out your quads. Foam rolling is like a massage; it gets the blood flowing and it preps muscles for stretching.
You need to lengthen the rectus femoris, the central muscle of the quad, that affects both the hip and knee joints and acts as a powerful hip flexor.
Kneeling Quad Stretch
Once you've rolled and stretched your quads, you also need to lengthen your psoas, one of the powerful hip flexors, which, when tight, can seriously inhibit the glutes from working.
Lunge With Reach and Twist
One you have loosened up your hips by rolling and stretching, you want to start working your butt. Working one leg at a time helps fire up the glutes, and holding one knee into the chest makes it harder use your back muscles, which is cheating in this exercise, so it's easier to feel the butt working.
Single-Leg Bridge
If you want a more challenging variation, try this advanced variation of the single-leg bridge.
Squats are a classic leg and butt exercise, but if you tend to overwork your quads, you need to really focus on your glutes throughout the motion by lifting your toes and concentrating on pushing through your heels.
Basic Squat
Hold a set of dumbbells to make this exercise more challenging.
This move is a great way to activate the back of the legs and the glutes. Adding a little squeeze of the butt when you return to standing helps remind your backside to work.
Romanian Deadlift
This move combines all the booty benefits of single-leg squats and single-leg deadlifts, but is much kinder to the knees. You can hold medium weights to the move to make it more challenging, but even without the weights, you will feel your butt working.
Single-Leg Toe Touch
The previous exercises focus mainly on the glute max, but this move is great for working the glute medius, located on the sides of the pelvis, and this muscle can "go to sleep" too. The glute med stabilizes the pelvis and prevents it from swaying side to side. All that swaying can wreak havoc on the knees, hips, and lower back too.
Side Stepping Squat With Band