They’re some of the most important muscles in your body, but you’ve likely never thought of them that way. They’re your glutes, and beyond just giving your butt shape, they’re essential for controlling your lower body, absorbing shock and generating force as you move around.
When neglected — even by the best athletes — you can end up with pain in the back, hips, knees or ankle. It’s called dormant butt syndrome, it’s serious business and it likely affects millions of Americans.
My colleagues and I at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center see this problem all the time, and too often it leads to injuries that may end up requiring surgery, as other parts of the body try to compensate for movements they weren’t built to handle.
[See: How to Know if You’re Exercising Too Much.]
Tracing Pain to Its Source
When people come in with lower body pain, my job is to figure out why. The body works as a linked system. It’s all connected, and anything we do on a normal basis is working against gravity, ground reaction forces and momentum. Only by testing strength, range of motion and the mechanics of the whole body can I confirm where the issue is coming from, and too often a major finding is a weak butt.
While it may make sense that an athlete can assume the butt is getting worked out when it isn’t, that assumption doesn’t apply to the millions of Americans not exercising at all. A lot of people are sitting more nowadays. That can contribute to tightness of the hip flexors, the big muscles on the front of your hips, and that can actually cause the glutes to not work as well.
When a patient with lower body pain comes to me for evaluation, I’ll check hip flexor tightness and hip joint mobility restrictions. We know that hip restrictions and tight hip flexors decrease the butt muscles’ ability to fire efficiently.
Then I’ll do a manual muscle test, where I have the patient lift each leg while I press down to determine if there’s adequate glute strength. Next I have the patient relax and I’ll feel the hamstring muscles and glute muscles, ask for the leg lift again and feel for a firing pattern.
Typically, your glute should contract first, then your hamstring — but often with dormant butt syndrome, the hamstring will kick in first and the glute second (and I’ve seen some people who don’t even fire their glute). Instead, they’ll lift the leg up and be able to resist my pressing without using any of their glute — but they’re compensating with excessive hamstring activity, which also increases a lot of low back muscle activity. It’s easy to understand how that can ultimately lead to hamstring strain and back pain, beyond just the lower body pain that the patient came in for.
[See: Easy Ways to Get 10,000 Steps Per Day.]
Rebooting Your Rear
To fix the problem, you have to work the source. I’m always surprised that even good athletes and active people can still have some degree of dormant butt syndrome. If you think about what a lot of people are doing, it’s a lot of straight ahead, or what we call sagittal-plane activities — squatting, repetitive running — that feed into the hip flexor getting tight.
Some ways to address the issue are pretty simple: regularly stretch the front of your hip and thigh; do exercises that activate the lateral hips, such as side planks, resisted side stepping and single leg balance activities; and, of course, do exercises to specifically activate the glutes, such as weighted bridges, lunges, deadlifts and squats.
Also important: don’t spend so much time sitting. Technology has created an environment in which we don’t have to move, which contributes to muscle tightness (specifically the hip flexors) and muscle weakness.
Many people spend the majority of their day sitting at work, sitting to drive and sleeping in the fetal position. Then they go to the gym and do hundreds of sit ups! This all feeds into the hip flexors getting tight and the butt muscles getting weak. No wonder we see posture issues and the dormant butt syndrome.
If you’re a sitter 9 to 5, try to get a standing desk or try to take frequent breaks where you stand up and do a few hip stretches. Try as best you can to not sit any longer than you have to. I know this is easier said than done.
The most important thing is to make sure your body is working the way it’s supposed to. The knee or the ankle or the back is just taking the hit for the other members of the team, the one that’s just not quite doing its job. By taking some time away from your normal routine to focus on the source of the problem, you’ll be preventing an injury that could take your routine completely off track.
[See: 8 Reasons Running Now Will Help You Later in Life.]
Chris Kolba is a physical therapist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
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Don’t Let Dormant Butt Syndrome Slow You Down originally appeared on usnews.com
