How on earth do you wake up one of the most essential muscle groups to energy transfer, lower back support, knee alignment, comfort, life and let’s face it, making a pair of pants look awesome?

The glutes are back on this Monday to kick off the week and get your workouts started in the right direction.

This has been one of my favorites for years and I have to credit one of my former coworkers Jasson Zurilgen.  He first showed me this exercise as a way to warm up the glutes and enforce better squatting and hip hinging.  But beyond that, it is also a great way to work on knee tracking and body awareness.  Because your eyes are out of the equation, it’s up to all your other senses to help keep form on point.  This is one of the keys to any training program.  It’s easy to get wrapped up in watching your form in front of mirror and leaning on it to help keep everything where it needs to be.  But what about the rest of your day?  Getting away from the visual feedback is essential to adapting to the environment around you and trusting your body.  That’s why this glute activator is awesome!

A few keys to remember:

• Knees need to stay lined up over the feet and stable
• Let your shoulders and head rest on the ball in a comfortable position
• Your first move is to let the hips drop towards the ground allowing the ball to roll forward so the knees that in the same place
• Once at the bottom, squeeze both glutes to drive back up to the starting position
• I like to feel my pelvis do a posterior tilt at the very top to emphasize the glutes a little extra
• Dog not required 🙂

Start with a few sets of 10 as part of your warm up and then transition right into your lifts.  This is best used right before any squat, hinge or lunge patterns!

Happy Monday!

-S