How to Fix Glute Tightness and Weakness in Runners

Audio Transcript

Today’s question is from Sarah

Sarah: My question is about stretching.

I have real problems with hip flexors, the muscles on the side of my legs, on the outside, and the muscles that stretch from my buttocks up to my lower back.

Do you have any tips and stretches that you do to help these muscles?

I do a lot of yoga poses to help stretch them out, but is there any other tip aside from stretching that you could recommend?

I find the really bad days or days when I don’t run, so actually doing more running actually helps it, but I’m sure there’s something else that can help me.

Any advice would be great. Thanks. Bye.

Michael: Thanks Sarah. This is a great question and one that every runner should be listening to as we all have weak hips and glutes.

Everyone needs to be paying attention to this.

There’s really two potential causes that are both strongly related, so it could be one or it could be both, and that’s hip, glute weakness.

Obviously we’re talking about that and then another issue called sciatica.

Firstly, let’s talk about hip and glute weakness because that’s probably what’s going on here, and it’s so common in runners that it’s something worth talking about regardless.

Glutes generate most of the power to propel you forward. Most people think of the quads or the calves, and they leave out the glutes.

The glutes are very, very important in your power, in your speed, and in your stride. The whole process is called hip extension, which is what we want to improve here.

Now again, hip and glute weakness is very, very common in runners.

This is mostly due to the motion of running. It’s all forward rather than those lateral movements or backward like in other sports like basketball or football or even tennis, which has a lot of lateral movement obviously.

These glutes become weak essentially due to inactivity of just running straight forward. And when it comes to distance, runners mostly run relatively slow, at least relative to our top ends sprint speed, which is where the glutes are actually used.

What can we do about this? Obviously there are a bunch of exercises and stretches that can activate the glutes and also strengthen them for training.

At first you kind of focus on activation, just because they get a little bit dormant, they just haven’t been used or you don’t use them very much, so they get to the point where you haven’t been using them, so you’ve got to activate them.

Over time, you’re going to strengthen them, and you’re going to get to the point where you don’t need to activate them as much and they’re going to be able to do the job on their own.

We don’t want to detail the exercises too much on the podcast, just because it gets complicated, but we’ll also post the links as well.

Let’s talk about the glute bridges. The glute bridges are pretty much the classic exercise for strengthening your glutes.

Basically, you put your back and your feet on the ground and you essentially just push upward, trying to use your glutes in your butt as much as possible.

The really important part, and this goes with all of the exercises that we’re talking about, is that you really need to squeeze the glutes at the top.

Without that squeeze, you’re not really pushing up with the glutes, and you’re not really getting that deep activation of the glutes.

Even when you push up to the top in the glute bridge, you’ve got to make sure that you’re really squeezing the glutes at the top.

Now, you can switch this up.

You can do a single leg glute bridge, where you only have one foot on the ground, and the other up. You can do glute matches, where you’re doing one foot at a time and alternating, and there’s several other different ways you can use that.

You can even start to use the Thera-Band resistance which we’ll talk about in a second, but anything you can do, you can start to switch it up just to get a little bit of a different stimulus.

For instance, the glute matches, sometimes work better or the single leg glute bridge, because then let’s say you have a weakness only on one side, you’re not just focusing on one glute when you’re doing this normal glute bridge. Sometimes doing single leg can actually work better.

Thera-Band work is another one that can be really, helpful for the glutes. This is basically an elastic Thera-Band, and you can find them at a sporting good store or you can find them at your gym.

Essentially, it’s just an elastic Thera-Band that you use as a resistance, so you hook it to a sturdy surface or you hook it between your ankles depending on what exercise you’re doing.

The classic one is the drive back, where you hook it up to something sturdy, put it around your ankle and you just drive your leg back.

That’s going to really activate your glutes.

Another one is just side to side, hooking it up to the sturdy surface and then putting your leg out to the side. That’s also going to work your IT band which we’re going to talk about in a second.

There are donkey kicks too, with Thera-Band resistance.

Basically, there are a lot of different yoga poses that you can do. You can also add a Thera-Band to add that resistance and really strengthen the glutes.

Now these are particularly helpful for treating and preventing IT band problems as well.

Anything with a Thera-Band which I believe was mentioned in the question when Sarah mentioned muscles on the outside of the leg.

IT bands are related to glute and hip issues.

When there is a weakness there, it’s going to translate right down to the IT band, so these Thera-Band work will help to strengthen those hip flexors – the hips, and the glutes, especially on the outside there. When you’re doing the side to side movement, it’s really going to help with the IT band.

Another thing is, bounce and plyometrics. These can be very, very helpful. There’s a lot of different ways to do these, but one in particular that we’ll talk about here is the straight leg bound, which is where you keep your legs straight.

You don’t bend your knees – you just go forward, bounding off each foot with a lot of force.

You’re really pounding off the floor each time you go forward and that’s going to help strengthen the glutes as well.

One other routine that we are fond of, at Runners Connect, is called the myrtl routine. This is from Coach Jay Johnson who does some personal coaching with us.

Basically, it’s a series of exercises aimed at your hip girdle, which is why we call them myrtl, but that’s another one that’s too complicated to go into at the podcast, but very, very helpful.

Now, all that’s very important regardless of what’s going on, but it’s worth mentioning, sciatica which is another very common problem for runners.

The sciatic nerve, from which the term sciatic originates, is an enormous structure that runs from your lower back, through your glutes, down your hamstrings and calves and into your foot.

It controls muscular activity for practically the whole posterior chain, which are the muscles on the back side of your body.

Pain here is generally felt on the lower back but it can be anywhere down that posterior chain.

There’s an easy task for sciatica. Basically you do a single leg raise. You lie on your back, use a rope or a Thera-Band to raise one leg up and you keep the knees straight.

If this produces lower back pain, that’s essentially a positive that you have sciatica.

Exercises for treating this really depend on the location of the pain.

If it’s piriformis, which is probably the most common, then you’re going to focus on glute and hip strengthening, which is obviously what we talked about before.

If the pain is entirely in the lower back, you’ll want to focus more on abs and back muscle exercises, which are related to these as well, but are a little bit of a different set of exercises.

Obviously, this relates back to the question. Hip and glute strengthening would obviously be a good idea pretty much regardless of what’s going on, but nonetheless, it’s worth looking into sciatica as well.

Now to recap, it could be a simple hip and glute weakness which could be sciatica or it could be both. Either way, strengthening of the hips and the glutes is worthwhile for pretty much every single runner.

I’ve truly never seen a runner who doesn’t need some sort of hip and glute strengthening; it’s everywhere, everyone needs it.

Again, we’ll post the links to our articles along with the podcast so that you can see the stretches and exercises in detail.

As always, I highly recommend working with a physical therapist or other specialist who can take a look at your body, develop a program specifically tailored for you and your particular weaknesses, but really anything you can do for the hips and glutes will benefit you pretty much, no matter what.

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Thanks for tuning in, have a great run today and we’ll see you next time.