Give you bum a boost with Pilates

Having a twenty-first century, western lifestyle generally means sitting on your bum for long periods of time. Working at a desk, driving, watching TV, going out to dinner with friends, scrolling through our phone it’s generally all done sitting down meaning that we spend a large amount of our waking day with our hips bent and gluteal muscles having a little holiday until the moment we need get up out of that chair. Maybe then we go for a walk, run or bike ride and we ask our glutes to wake up and get a move on. If they can’t then it’s up to other muscles to try and do the job instead.

Conversations about poor glute activation as well as strength are all over the internet, with suggestions that low glute activation and strength can cause all manner of issues such as hip, knee and back pain as well as reduced performance in activities like running, jumping and cycling. Whether you suffer from any of these issues or not, or whether a medical professional has suggested you have an issue with glute activation, or not, we generally accept that when it comes to muscle tone it’s a case of “use it or lose it”. So if we aren’t really using our glutes, in fact we’re spending long periods of time in positions that switch them off, then maybe it’s a good idea to get using them.

When I first started on my journey to explore the classical work on all the pieces of apparatus it became pretty clear that my glutes and hamstrings were more elusive to me than other muscle groups. I'd been practicing Pilates for several years and could recruit my abdominals pretty easily but after many more years of running and cycling my quads and hip flexors had become my go to muscle group making it really hard to use their opposites very effectively.

In the classical Pilates repertoire there are at least 100 exercises that activate or strengthen the gluteal muscles specifically or the entire posterior chain of the body. About twenty or so of these are performed on the mat, which is about half of the full classical mat flow, but the rest are all performed on pieces of apparatus from the Reformer right down to the Magic Circle. Some of the earliest exercises we learn on the mat are Side-Kicks, which are great for using our gluteus medius, and Grasshopper and Shoulder Bridge which work all of the gluteals to some degree. The queen of apparatus for glute exercise options is the Chair which seems ironic given everything I’ve said about sitting! However, it’s versatility means we can perform exercises standing next to it, on it, over it, you name it. Almost half of the exercises in the Chair’s repertoire use the gluteal muscles or the whole posterior chain. Great options for developing all the gluteal muscles are standing pumping exercises where we stand beside or in front of the chair with one foot on the moveable paddle and pump up and down. More advanced exercises such as High Frog, a kind of levitated shoulder bridge, activate the body’s whole posterior chain through extension.

Pilates is about much more than building strength in one part of the body, it’s a whole body conditioning method that helps us activate the muscles we might not otherwise use, and build strength where we need it. If there is a studio near you that offers access to the whole system through all apparatus then you will have the breadth of all these exercises to choose from, but even without access to all of those pieces of kit the Mat still gives us great options to work those gluteal muscles and get bum building.