Why are the gluteal muscles so important? What is the role that they play? Why do they become weak? How do I strengthen them?
The Gluteal muscles are super important as they help stabilise your pelvis. Having a strong stable pelvis is extremely important to help prevent and reduce the risk of injuries from running, sporting activities, gym work and everyday life. Improving the strength in these muscles are important to help you with your training, running, squat technique and low back pain.
Do you always strain your hamstring muscle? Is it always one side in particular that you feel the pain in? Well, what this can mean is that your gluteal muscles may be weak. When your glutes are weak your hamstring and low back are over working. Its like being at work, you are being very productive fulfilling your role but your colleague is not. To meet the deadline you have to overwork to overcompensate finish your colleagues work. Well, this is similar to what happens in our body with our hamstring muscles and low back, we over work these muscles resulting in pain in the lower back and repetitive hamstring muscle strains/sprains.
Why is it prone to being weak?
We live in a world where we spend so much time sitting down. We sit down to eat breakfast, sit down in the car to travel to work, get to work and sit at our desk, go to our lunch break and sit down to eat, then jump back in the car to get home from work, when we get home what do we do?
It has been calculated that on average each day we sit around 7.7 hours! And what muscle do we sit on? What muscle isn’t being used? When our muscles don’t get used, what then happens to them? They get weak. Sitting all day on the gluteal muscles means that we are not working the muscle, but we are also putting more pressure through the muscle that it becomes more dysfunctional.
What this all means is that your body now has an abnormal movement pattern, therefore your brain tries to help out by getting surrounding joints and muscles to work a little bit harder so that you can still move, walk and flex and extend your hip. But what happens with all work and no play? We get tired. Our muscles get tired too. They become sore, tight and may be more prone to having injuries. A tight muscle is an indicator to your Chiropractor that the muscle is weak.
So what can be done to help you?
1. STOP SITTING FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME
- Make sure you don’t sit for longer than 1 hour each time
- Break up your sitting with a 5 minute walk
- Park the car a little bit further from work and walk an extra 10 minutes
- Have a stand up desk rather than a sit down desk
2. RETAIN THE MUSCLE
- Focus on squeezing the gluteal muscles to help strengthen them
- Make sure your squatting technique is correct – your knees don’t go over your toes, you bend at the hips first then the knees, squeeze your gluteal muscle when coming up from your squat.
3. HAVE YOUR PELVIS, SACROILLIAC JOINTS AND GLUTEAL MUSCLES ASSESSED BY YOUR CHIROPRACTOR AT INDAH HEALTH
- Recent research has found that adjustments to the pelvis area can help strengthen the muscle as it allows the communication between the nerve that innervates the muscle and the muscle to function at its best.
- Optimum Alignment allows for Optimal Functioning of the movement patterns in the body
Follow this link to calculate how long you are sitting for http://www.juststand.org/Tools/SittingCalculator/tabid/866/language/en-US/Default.aspx
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