How to activate your Glutes (& Fix Gluteal Amnesia)

Have you been told that your glute muscles are not being activated properly? Of course, you now want to find out how to activate your glutes properly. Maybe you’ve even heard of the term “gluteal amnesia” or “Dead Butt Syndrome”. How serious is this condition? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Prolonged Sitting as a Cause of Gluteal Amnesia?

First of all, I can reassure you that your glutes are not dead or inactive and don’t need to be “activated”. Let’s take a closer look it this.

So one of the most common claims is that prolonged sitting damages the nerves in the glutes, because they are compressed all the time.

This supposedly results in poor activation of the glutes. And as a consequence other muscles (like the back of the legs) need to compensate, resulting in pain and injuries in the back, knees and hips.

Sounds logical, right? Except there’s no evidence supporting this. Actually, there is a lot of evidence rejecting this hypothesis. There is a paper by Swain et al. (2019) that found no link between sitting, bending, etc., and back pain.

So if prolonged sitting does not cause back pain, we can simply ignore the “sitting will compress your nerve” statement.

Oh, and another reason why this statement doesn’t make any sense: every one of us compresses many nerves every day — even over extended periods.

For example, when I rest my forearm while working at my desk (which I do for hours each day), I don’t experience loss of sensation in my hands. And I’m also still able to activate my forearm muscles just fine.

Or if you sleep on your side (like I do) you also compress nerves in our arm and shoulder. Does that mean you can no longer activate your shoulder? Come on.

Don’t get me wrong – if you sit a lot in your daily life and are otherwise relatively inactive, then your glute muscles will likely be weaker and smaller than those of more active people. But we shouldn’t label that as a medical condition.

Imagine having smaller biceps were a medical condition.

On top of that: if you claim, that weak/inactive glutes cause knee, hip or back pain, I’m of the opinion that you have to prove that.

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How to Activate Your Glutes – Scientifically Reviewed

I actually looked for well-executed studies, who support this statement and found none.

There are only studies showing snapshots of people with back pain that find those individuals have weaker glute muscles. Does that mean that weak glutes cause back pain? Nope.

It’s way more likely that the back pain caused the people to be less active and that subsequent inactivity led to the weakness of the glutes and the decrease in muscle mass.

And we also know that when you experience pain, your body limits your ability to produce force, which means “weaker” muscles.

Let me ask you a question:

If poor activation or weakness of the glute muscles were the main cause of back pain, then back pain would significantly improve or disappear only when we strengthen the glutes, right?

Well – that’s not the case, as shown by the study from Gianola et al. (2021), which found that many treatments (like manual therapy, education, exercises) are also effective for treating back pain.

And if your glute muscles were REALLY “turned off” (like many videos and articles claim) you wouldn’t even be able to stand up from a chair or walk up the stairs.

I can already hear you saying:

“But I don’t really feel my glute muscles during exercises like Squats, Lunges etc.”

Don’t worry. This doesn’t say anything about how active your glutes are. The feeling during an exercise doesn’t indicate how effective the exercise is. There’s a paper by Plotkin et al. (2023) that compared hip thrusts with squats.

All participants felt the hip thrust more in their glutes than the squat. And when they measured the muscle activity, they saw more activation during hip thrusts. However, strength and muscle growth improved equally in both exercises.

The Influence of Fear and Catastrophizing

There’s one thing we definitely do know, though. And that is: fear and catastrophizing lead to pain, worsen it, and can negatively impact rehabilitation.

And it’s exactly those unfounded medical conditions like “gluteal amnesia” which cause fear in people! This is shown in the study by Rajasekaran et al. (2020), which looked at the effects of explaining MRI results to people.

They found that those who had their images explained (even when there were abnormalities, which is completely normal) had worse pain improvement and function than those who did not receive an explanation of their images.

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My Personal Recommendation

Let’s not make a big deal out of whether someone sits a lot or has weak or small glutes, as long as we don’t have clear evidence that it’s problematic. Otherwise, we’re just unnecessarily spreading fear, which can have negative consequences.

I’m the biggest advocate of training the glutes and generally having a more active lifestyle (which, by the way, also helps with back pain as well as knee and hip pain).

We just spoke about back pain a lot. It is also often claimed that an anterior pelvic tilt is the cause of back pain. Check out this article now, to find out, why this is also a myth.

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