Real-Life Benefits Of Strong Glutes: Why You NEED Strong Glute Muscles

The glutes muscles are an underutilized area which makes them weak, dormant, and sometimes tight. The benefits of strong glutes for busy moms is huge and can help with everything from carrying babes to an easier time playing tag. By improving the glutes muscles strength (and really, the strength of the entire posterior chain), you’ll have an easier time with everyday tasks.

When people hear the words “glutes muscles”, they naturally think of their bum cheeks. And while that is correct, your glutes muscles also wrap around the side of your hips as well.

For many people, our glutes are under-activated. Placing the focus on strong glutes can have big effects on daily activities. The benefits of strong glutes include:

• easier time with day to day tasks (carrying, holding)
• less back pain
• reduced knee pain
• better performance (running, jumping, lifting, climbing)
• improved posture

Strong glute muscles help in all of these scenarios. The benefits of strong glutes are so important that not making them a priority is where most moms fail.

 

Function Of The Glutes

With so many benefits of strong glutes. it only makes sense that your glutes muscles are responsible for more than just thrusting. 

As a result, in order to improve your glutes muscles, you need to train them through all of their functions and in multiple planes. This helps your glutes work together.

Within the movement of your body your glutes are responsible for your hips in & during:

• extension
• hyperextension
• external rotation
• transverse abduction
• abduction

These functions aid and support everyday movement and by strengthening them you improve your ability to perform day to day tasks. like picking up your kids properly.

 

The Benefits Of Strong Glutes

Below are the most common strong glutes benefits you’ll notice. However, keep in mind that the glutes muscles need to be trained in a variety of planes as well as with a variety of loads and volume.

Likewise, you also want to pay attention to hip mobility as well (learn more about the importance of hip mobility and strong glutes in pregnancy and postpartum)

 

Strong Glutes Help Improve Posture & Alleviate Back Pain

Due to our daily lives, we tend to have very under activated and weak glutes (we sit all day!).

Especially as moms, our posture tends to be based on how we’re carrying our kids. Instead of using our muscles, we lean to different sides of our body to support our babes.

One of the biggest benefits of strong glutes is that it can help improve your posture, thus alleviating back pain.

Glutes help pull your pelvis back into place and takes tension off of your lower back. This, combined with strengthening the anterior core and upper back can improve posture greatly.

Here’s a bit more info on glutes and back pain.

 

Glutes Are Part Of The Pelvic Floor

The word “pelvic floor” is just starting to become mainstream (thank god!).

Your pelvic floor is basically a sling that helps keep your organs inside your body. And one of the muscle groups within that sling are the glutes muscles.

Your pelvic floor is most chatted about during pregnancy and if you have had a postpartum checkup with a pelvic floor physio you’ll know all about it.

Through pregnancy and birth, our pelvic floors become stretched and/or weak. Since the glutes are one of the muscles necessary for the pelvic floor to function optimally it’s essential to make sure they’re activating when they should be.

For this reason, using glute exercises while pregnant (and before and after) can help quite a bit regarding back pain and recovery with pregnancy.

 

Strong Glutes Sky Rocket Performance

Having strong glutes is one of the essentials of being a good athlete. Even if you never plan on playing competitively, having strong glutes gives you the power to push, sprint, pivot, and perform – all of which we do when playing with our kids!

Even if you never plan on playing competitively, having strong glutes helps: Give you the power to push. To sprint. To Pivot safely ... all of which we do when playing with our kids! #glutes #fitasamamabear #trainglutes #momlife… Click To Tweet

Strong Glutes Reduce Knee Pain

In my career as a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist, I have had too many people to count come through my door complaining about knee pain.

More often than not, these clients have been runners but there’s been lots of are not runners and still experience pain.

While stretching and hip mobility work are part of the equation. The common denominator with almost all cases is weak glutes.

Strong glutes help pull the knee into the path it should be when you land. Exercises like banded squats help re-train movement patterns and get the outer hip to fire and stabilize the knee.

You can learn more about how to prevent knee pain with glute training in this blog post but using glute exercises is a crucial part of it.

 

The Benefits Of Strong Glute Muscles For Moms

While better gym performance, less pain, and a shapely butt might be okay, as busy moms we’re really looking for the day to day stuff. 

From a life perspective, having strong glutes muscles lets you:

• keep up with your kids while playing tag or running beside them biking
• Carry grocery bags and a baby at the same time without pain
• prevent injuries from bending over to pick up a million toys

Strong glutes muscles are crucial for fit and healthy living regardless of what your goals are.

 

How To Strengthen The Glutes Muscles

Learning to strengthen your glutes muscles requires a multi-style approach. Remember you need to:

• target all of their functions and not just hip extension
• give them a variety of weights and repetitions
• learn to contract them properly (sometimes this means working on hip mobility)
• use a variety of exercises

This is a list of my favorite glute exercises that can be done at home. However, there are so many more.

• Frog pumps
• Reverse hyperextensions
• Crossack squats
• Weighted glute exercises

When it comes to strong glutes, a mini band is easily the best tool you can invest in. You can use code mamabearfit to grab one. 

These mini-bands help retrain movement, hip the outer glutes more than dumbbells will, and can be added to other glute exercises to increase their tension.

Below is a *super old* m,ini glute circuit you can do at home to get started with if you need the inspiration. I do have a lot of glute workouts on my YouTube channel and you can peek my favorite glute finishers too.

 

Learning to activate and engage the glute properly and completely is the first step to improving them. From there, focus on progressing the glutes with weights, repetitions, or variations. Great glute workouts can be hammered out in under ten minutes.

 

Don’t forget to pin these 3 reasons to train glutes muscles!