Is your glute med really shut down? Anyone can make someone fail a glute med test and then claim to fix them, usually by having them do hundreds of meters of band walks or squats with a band around the knees. Never seen it? Scroll Instagram for all of 5 minutes and I guarantee you see what I’m talking about. Knees cave in? Some of the world’s strongest Olympic lifters have knees that cave in. I would not presume to say that someone who can snatch 180kg has “weak glutes”. The adductor magnus has a strong hip extension moment arm, especially when the hips are flexed. And so, we will often see a valgus twitch coming out of the whole which does not justify the “glute not firing” categorization.
In the industry today, there is still an obsession about the glute med weakness. I wrote an article about it on Thibarmy.com in 2016, A Word on Glute Activation, and yet I still find myself talking about it today. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that there isn’t a need for many people to have better access to their glute med. I just think that 1) the language needs to change (it’s not shut down!) and 2) the way we address glute med function can be more optimal.
Admittedly, most people test poorly on standard manual muscle testing for the glute med. We could also argue that the fact that this test is done in a mechanically disadvantageous position and that this position is unusual for most means that you could easily outmuscle a client just to prove a point. Just saying.
If you are interested in doing it right, here is how it should be done:
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