“You would forget your butt if it wasn´t tied on to you! ¨ Perhaps you have heard this expression. Unfortunately, many runners forget about their gluteal muscles and the results can be disastrous.
According to Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT) Certified Specialist Stacey Earl, “A lot of people come in with knee pain and I’m finding things in their low back and their hips not anywhere near where they feel their pain.” Earl finds that many of these injuries are caused by gluteal amnesia. The glute muscles literally forget how to do their job. “You have the gluteus minimus, the gluteus medius and the gluteus maximus. If any one of those can’t fire on demand and do its job, everything else will compensate around it. This may impair the range of motion of the hips. Once you start to lack hip extension, your quads are going to get tight. And that puts more pressure on your knee.”
What causes gluteal amnesia? According to Earl, “If you train a too hard and don’t give yourself time to recover, muscles will start to compensate. Also, many people sit all day and those hip flexors get tight and the back is in a poor position. They do no type of exercise to combat that. But they’re still trying to run. No one likes to do the exercises that support the hard training that we do. Everybody just wants to do the run training, get to the race and finish.”
How does a MAT Certified Specialist treat this problem? “I look at it like I have this GPS system. I go in and I zone right in on range of motion, what’s limited and I try to figure out what exactly isn’t working. Piece by piece and I get these guys stronger and then I integrate them into the bigger system. A lot of the exercises that I give when I am trying to re-balance the muscular system are low-intensity isometrics. If the muscles are sequenced properly, we are not going to have as much breakdown.”
