Tense Your Core and Squeeze Your Glutes (As Soon as You Find Them)

On my road to becoming a trainer, this was the most valuable instruction I ever received, but I did not learn it at “trainer school.” Like a lot of others, I learned it from wandering around on the internet and discovering the training guru, Pavel Tsatsouline.  

Pavel has a way of reducing fitness strategies and principles to nuggets of simple, easy-to-understand instruction. Actually, Pavel’s instructions sound more like commands, but that is part of the famous Pavel mystique.

First principle: all of our muscles are connected, so drop the idea of jumping on an exercise machine that isolates a single muscle group, unless you want to hyper-develop every single muscle in your body and become a professional bodybuilder. If you are looking for functional strength and fitness that works in the real world, start thinking about whole-body exercise.

Now that we are all on the same page, let’s take two very simple steps that will start you on the road to getting functionally stronger than you’ve ever been.

We will start with your core – a bunch of muscles that wrap around your mid-section like an internal girdle.  Over the years, your core has become soft, which is bad – very bad.  Besides performing the rather important task of protecting your spine, these muscles are meant to work together to help you move with strength, bend, turn, twist, and lift heavy objects safely and efficiently.

Then, there are the muscles that you are right now sitting on. Those are the glutes, and they are the biggest, strongest muscles in your body. Stand up and poke your finger tips into your buns. If they have the consistency of cottage cheese, they are doing you very little good. If you want to move with power, you will need to change that.

So let’s get started. Stand up. Now, tense your core.  How do you that? You react as you would if someone were throwing a punch at your stomach. It’s a very natural response. Hold that tension and increase it. Your core is now engaged. These muscles have been called to action.

Now squeeze your cheeks (not the ones on your face) as hard as you can. Pretend that you are holding a quarter between them, and you cannot let it drop. This silly but valuable image comes directly from Pavel.  I’m pretty sure he can hold a dime between his cheeks. Now jab your finger tips into those cheeks and make contact with your glutes. They have been dormant for years. They used to fire automatically, and you want them to do that again. They will. You have just begun a program to retrain them.

So, jab your stomach and feel the core muscles firing, and then jab you glutes and feel them firing.  Now, relax. Now do it all again.  Do this often. The muscles will get harder and stronger. You will soon begin involving them in your exercise routines – ALL of your exercise routines.

And one day soon, when you least expect it, when you are walking up a hill, or down a flight of stairs, or carrying a heavy object, you will notice them firing automatically – strongly, efficiently, and naturally.