The Glutes - A Booty-Full Muscle
The glutes are at the epicentre of your body. They act as stabilisers, and absorb impact. Strong glutes will help you become more robust in life. Running is easier, it takes the strain off your knees, your back doesn't hurt as much after sitting down in work all day. Moving stuff is less difficult, playing with your kids becomes easier, picking things up is less strainful.
Your glutes are meant to be the strongest muscle in the body. Yet many of us don't even train them. In fact in most cases who walk through the gym id say they are pretty redundant. Totally switched off. If a client comes to us and wants to improve his power in boxing, work the glutes, if someone has a bad back, work the glutes, if you want to improve posture, work the glutes. Can you see the trend?
Unfortunately as we grow older a lot of us become less mobile (or lazy!) Sitting at a desk all day, sitting in the car to and from work, sitting at home eating and watching TV, then finally lying down in bed all night. This pretty much retires the glutes from doing any work at all. Once they shut down you will start to notice nagging issues with your physical health. If only we continued our primitive movement patterns from when we were small babies, when we had unrestricted movement patterns!
Often called “gluteal amnesia” we forget how to use our butt! We can't remember how to engage them, often surrounding muscles take over the workload. Our glutes are meant to be the strongest muscles in our body (thus the reason you often see people hip bridging over twice their body weight quite easily in the gym) due to the body compensating we often put all the wear and tear on other areas. Hence the back problems, sciatica, quad, knee and hamstring issues. Over time this will result in injuries which are all preventable. If you wish to have a body that runs like a well oiled machine then work your glutes.
In order for us to preserve and develop the glutes we must directly activate them. Daily activities, walking, climbing stairs, doing household chores may keep your other muscles functioning but they don't hit the glutes. You need heavy, explosive work to get these big strong muscles firing.
The desk job population are at most risk from affecting the efficiency of the glutes. You see sitting down all day causes you to tighten up and lose mobility. Especially in the hip flexor region. This will cause the glutes to switch off, as they work best in hip extension which people with tight flexors cannot achieve. If you are one of those people take extra care with flexibility and mobility, you will probably need to activate the glutes more frequently than others too.
In conclusion you can see how important the posterior really is. Remember there are no gender specific exercises either so whether you're a female figure athlete looking to compete or a male middle aged office worker, activating, using and working the glutes is equally important to one gender as it is the other.